The Rogue Wave

I was a Geriatric Paperboy in Kodiak Alaska—and they fired me!

2010-12-19T15:29:00.007-09:00

First off, this whole thing is Drew Herman's fault.

It was during a fundraiser for publicradio KMXT 100.1 FM two Saturdays ago. I was covering the early morning phone shift when Drew's stylish pea-coat whisked into the newsroom. I had just finished buffing the stainless sink and chrome fixtures.Radio folk are wonderfully slovenly.

"Terry Haines" he said "You are just the man to help me with a problem."
"Anything I can do, Professor."
"I have had a tune stuck in my head that I simply cannot identify." He hummed a fragment.
“I believe that is Mendelssohn's Fifth in D Flat Major, and you can certainly bet De Major was flat after he finished Mendelssohn's fifth...”
“Ah of course. I knew I could rely on you.”

Drew is a local writer of many talents (he recently aced the listener quiz on “Performance Today”.) I discovered he was, among his capacities, a Paperboy . I was intrigued. I get fidgety between fishing seasons.
“Paperboy, huh? That sounds like fun. How do you get that?”

“It is simple enough. Just go into the office and inquire with Janet.” I resolved to do just that.

Poor Janet. I would go on to make her life a living hell.

Two days later I was the proud Paperboy of two routes: Three Sisters and Bell's Flats. My wife was incredulous.
“So you took the two worst paper routes in the northern hemisphere, they are thirty miles apart and it's the dead of winter?”
“I'm just trying to help out.”
“You could help me out. What about the list on the refrigerator?”
“I plan to do that stuff between 3 and 5 AM while I listen to the BBC.”

She shook her head and walked away as I prepped the Jeep for arctic travel. My routes were the coldest this side of Iceland: down the precipitous curving iceways of Three Sisters, and in the wide dark valley known locally as “The Flats.”

Three Sisters is five miles or so north of Kodiak City. It is comprised of a handful of forking dirt roads, paved with ice at this time of year, that wind down a patch of the woody rocky coastline above Monashka Bay seeking out the nooks and cornices where tight little cabins are sometimes built side by side with wide windowed Alaska mansions. It is not a walking route. Ice covers the long sloping driveways like poured glass. I delivered 17 wafer thin newspapers, skillfully engine braking, dodging around dogs and goats and between spruce trees.

It is only after I headed out to the Flats--- through town and up to Dead Man's Corner, past the airport and the Coast Guard Base and around Woman's Bay,( the ruts in the ice holding the Jeep on the road through forty mile gusts of northwest wind,) that it occured to me: there is no way to make a cent on these routes—its just too much gas.
At nearly four bucks a gallon I am delivering forty two 50cent newspapers at a fuel cost of ten dollars per day.

The math was not lost on my wife.
“So they are paying you 120 dollars a month, and it will cost you two hundred in gas to deliver them.”
“I think I could break even in Three Sisters if I double the readership. I have big plans to go door to door...”
“Fine. But you can't drive out to the Flats everyday on your own dime.”

So the next day I told Janet I would like to keep the Three Sisters route but explained that I couldn't drive out to the Flats anymore, for reasons of domestic tranquility.

“But” she said “you signed The Contract.”

“I know” I said, smirking slightly, “and I certainly would not want to default on my paperboy contract but I just can't go out to the Flats anymore. I have big plans to expand readership at Three Sis...”

“But” she said “you signed The Contract.”

A chill raised the hairs on the back of my neck and I wondered if I should have read The Contract before signing it. It did have remarkable heft for a document designed for fourteen year olds, and perhaps the cracked leather binding and the fact that I was required to ink my name in blood should have been red flags as well.

“Well” I said, after an awkward pause, “I was talking to a friend of a friend about taking over the Flats. I'll talk to her again. Oh and I can't deliver papers on Thursday and Friday. I have to go to Anchorage to yell at the federal Fisheries Management Council and be on TV.”
Janet just raised a bemused eyebrow, but I seemed to hear demon voices keening low from somewhere down the long hallway. Chuckling nervously I grabbed my bundle and jumped into the Jeep. I delivered all of them even the Bell's Flats route, telling myself I would do the right thing and find a replacement on Monday.”
In Anchorage I instruct the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council on ways they can fix their errant policies. I feel confident they will listen this time. I was also very happily cranky as part of a panel segment of “Moore Up North” with that Alaska treasure Shannyn Moore.

Monday back in Kodiak saw me less than thrilled about my new paper route.
“I'm tired from all the mental engagement.” I told my wife.
“Not from the fact finding missions at Humpy's and Darwin's Theory?”
“And the Taproot. That place is great. Alright”. I struggled off the couch and to the Jeep. But I obviously needed to earn some gas money. I called Seamus. They had a couple of skates that need stripping and sticking. Sweet. I figured I would go down to the boat harbor tomorrow and knock out a couple before my route.

At the newspaper office I miss Janet who is out delivering another route. This pattern would continue. Each day I would come in with Janet out, tell them I couldn't deliver to the Flats anymore. And take the papers anyway. I only realized later that I was doing the Dread Pirate Robert's technique: “Well goodnight Wesley, most likely kill you in the morning.”

Then on Wednesday two things happened: My friend offered me a fishing job and I met The Publisher.

I was down on Seamus' boat working on my skate (I only ended up finishing one, but engaged in some great conversations regarding human nature and the function of faith). The wind was gusting pretty hard so I decided to check the lines of a friend's boat before lunch. On the way down the float I ran into a cod job.

Now there is a little man in my head who sits on a stool in front of a big red button listening for my ears to hear the words “Do you want to go fishing?” His only job is to lean forward and slam that button when he hears that magic question.
“Yes I do.” My mouth says automatically.
Ah Ha! Heavens be praised! A real job, with water underfoot and the shoreline a safe distance away! But what about The Contract? What fell fate awaited me if I broke it?
Nervous eyeballs regarded me at the newspaper office as I gave my daily renunciation of the Flats route. “I can't keep sneaking out to the Flats this way.” I joked. “My wife thinks I'm having an affair. “

I sensed there was something different. A presence. Then a figure glided out of the shadows like Fu Manchu from a forties film noir.
“I am Richard.” he said, “the Publisher.”
“Terry the Paperboy” I shook his hand. It crackled with static power.
“What would it take to induce you to keep taking papers to the Flats known commonly as Bell's?”
“Well,” I said “it seems to me that if you are already sending a truck out there to deliver to the store you could just give your carrier gas money and have him do it. That way you don't have to send it separately and the carrier wouldn't have to worry about gas wiping out his meager profits.” Now I realize this was a bit disingenuous of me, knowing I would have to go cod fishing next week anyway. But I thought this would work better for the next carrier anyway, and be more efficient for the paper.

I'm helping out.

The Publisher pounded the keys on a steam powered calculator and announced a fairly reasonable number. Great. I would call my friend's friend and tell her to come to the news office and grab the Flat's route- she wouldn't have my gas worries, making it a much better job.
Friday saw me doing my last deliveries in the Flats. It was five o'clock: rather late-- I had taken my herd of corgis for a walk to the top of pillar Mountain first. I felt good. The cold sunset was shining through the ice fog and the Flats were glowing in a surreal light. Now all I had to do was find a substitute for the Three Sisters route. I was still exited about expanding the...
My cell phone rang. It was Janet. She sounded tired. I realized that I had been little more than a headachy question mark for her. The good news was my friend's friend would start Monday. But I did not need to worry about Three Sisters anymore either. I had broken The Contract.
“You mean I'm fired from my paperboy job?”
I flipped the phone shut and thought “Oh thank God.” I had one more stop- a lady who hadn't received her paper for a couple of days even though I was sure I had delivered it. I knocked on her door and she answered in her bathrobe. Darn it. I hate answering my door in my robe. She seemed irritated. I tell her I'm sorry she hasn't got her paper and ask if I'd left it in the right place. It seems I did. I don't get it.
“Well I'm very sorry Ma'am. Here are those papers, and today's”
“That's OK”. She says, her face softening “Merry Christmas.”
“Thanks. Merry Christmas to you, too.” I smiled. That was the best tip I got.

Copyright—Terry Haines 2010

2010-03-20T08:26:00.005-08:00

I was sitting next to Satan at the BnB

in Kodiak in the winter of 1992

when those two federal agents fell through the front door.

That was their first mistake: always enter the BnB through the side door.

Satan was spinning a quarter on the bar and a williwaw whirled across the street. The tiny tornado snatched up slate dust and coffee cups and crows as it rose up behind the feds and shoved them through the doorway. Their awkward entrance caused one of them to jostle the elbow of the dangerously crystallized Crabber Mike as he was lining up a shot on the eight ball.

The quarter hummed and jumped and seemed solid as it settled into a saddle in the red mahogany. The Devil arched his eyebrow and smiled like the Yukon border: long and cold and crooked. I knew those federal boys were in for a whole lot of trouble.

“Why don’t you just leave those fellas be?’ I asked.

“Oh you know me.” Said Satan, sipping his Sauza as he tipped his head toward them, “It’s you they‘re looking for, of course.” The corner of his smile poked me in the ribs.

“I know.” I said, pulling the Tilley hat down over my eyes, “I know.”

Satan scooted down as the agents approached. They sat on either side of me. I slumped over my liquid sunshine.

“You Terry?”

I sat up. “Yes I am. And you are?” I stuck out my hand.

“Ahm.” He shook my hand- soft and droopy. “I am Agent Breitz. This is Agent Dobromowitz. ” Red lettered FBI badges flopped open. Behind us we heard a short laugh, a cry of alarm and the sound of a sack of potatoes hitting the floor from a height of three feet.

“Two Liquid Sunshines for Cool Breeze and Dobro, please Bernie.”

“No beers sir. This is official business.” he waved off Bernie who went on filling the pints anyway.

Crabber Mike, who had been looming, stepped up. “Who's your friends, Terry?”

“Oh- Crabber Mike, this Is Cool Breeze and this is Dobro.”

“You.” He pointed a kielbasa sized finger at Agent Dobromowitz “You made me miss.”

“Maybe you two should play a game” I suggested. “Looks like Louie's taking a break.” Louie was laying on the floor. His hat was a couple of feet away.

“Go ahead Tom.” Agent Breitz handed his partner the pint of Sunshine. “Blend in. But be on your guard.” He looked around the dark old bar- (not much more than a converted cabin, really)- “There is something about this place...” His eyes rested momentarily on the Devil. “Something...” He took a slug of the Sunshine. Crabber Mike seemed to smile behind his impenetrable blond beard which run high up his red cheeks like wild salmonberry bushes. He even has a streak of blond hair that runs across the bridge of his nose and reaches up for his eyebrows.

“Terry." Agent Breitz turned to me.

“Yes?”

”You are not an easy person to put your finger on in a town of only six thousand residents, and that is saying something, considering our training and resources. Everywhere we went you had just left.”

It was true. My crabber senses had been making me move all day. I didn't know what was making them go off, but when I saw Satan sitting at the B holding an icy Bloody Mary to his forehead I just sat next to him and waited. When you see Satan you may as well walk right up to him. The Devil is, if anything, more dangerous from a distance. One Sunshine later the FBI was sniffing up the stairway.

Why me? What did I do?

Did they know about the doorway under my house? That Pillar mountain was a spongecake of secret tunnels and chambers, chock full of whacked out delusional nutjobs with bears and blowtorches and massive Tesla coils? That ghosts of whalers and longliners past sat at the bar beside us??

“You were born, were you not, at Bunker Hill Air Force Base in Peru, Indiana?”

“Yeah...my Dad was in the Air Force.”

“Your parents were unwitting participants in a genetic manipulation experiment. In 1961 the Department of Defense embarked on a program using irradiated prune juice and a specially designed forceps in an attempt to create a supersoldier. You are the result.”

“I'm a Supersoldier?”

“No. The experiment was a spectacular failure and a humiliating black stain on the nation's entire secret genetic manipulation program, sadly.

You see, scientists had long been aware that certain individuals have “Rainman” type abilities: fantastic cognitive and memory powers combined with a fractured and asocial mentality. We hoped select American children could be carefully damaged to create the perfect soldier: ruthless, relentless and with a computer like ability to remember mission parameters and details as well as rules of engagement, ahhh anniversaries, phone numbers...”

“I'm a Super Rolodex?”

“No. One by one the participants have all died in remarkably stupid ways. Number Four stepped in front of a bus while buttering a bagel. Number thirty two simply forgot he was in the bathtub. Etcetera.”

“I'm a Super moron?”

“Yes. The only remarkable thing about you is that you are still alive. However, since the government has spent so much time and effort on you we have decided to present you with a unique opportunity to serve your country.

Satan elbowed me. Crabber Mike was physically pouring a shot of Jagermeister down Dobro's throat.

Over the years Satan and I have gotten pretty well acquainted, I’m sorry to say.

And I’m not going to tell you he’s misunderstood. He’s understood pretty well, actually, except for the part about the souls.

And the part about who he is and where he came from.

But he really hates the humans.

He despises us.

The Angels took his wings away impossibly long ago, and the time has tightened around the Devil like a Moebius anaconda. It has crushed and swallowed him. In its belly the acid of the ages has left him stripped and diminished. He has become a shard of sharpened bone, a hard evil speck with a single flickering pilot light in his head that won't go out:

He wants to see the human race burned down to cosmic ash and blown across the expanse of this entirely too unlikely universe. The looping and repeating laughtrack behind the human comedy has driven the Devil mad. He wants us gone, gone, gone, finally gone. And if that means he is destroyed too, along with all the Angels and everything else that ever has been, or will ever be, well, that’s OK with Mr. Scratch.

He just wants out.

Chapter One: Dogs Playing Poker

Set out running but I take my time…

A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine…

I first met the Devil in Dutch Harbor, which may come as no surprise to anyone who has spent time on that island paradise. It was 1989, before the crab was rationalized and the dire one thousand were sent back to Kodiak and Seattle to gnaw through their long winter months standing on dirt.

Reagan Would Have Been Disgusted

2009-10-04T07:36:00.005-08:00

Reagan was wrong. But he was a good man.

Ronald Reagan looked at Socialism and the Soviets and saw evil. He looked at Capitalism and America and saw good. He saw totalitarianism as a system of chains. Where he saw those chains in America he tried to remove them. He believed, like Greenspan, that people were, if not "good", at least pragmatic enough to work together toward goals that lift all boats with the rising tide of prosperity.

What he forgot is that there is a reason we lock our doors at night.

The rise of Corporate rule here in America, evidenced by the continuing failures of the SEC and the chilling control of the Sickness and Death Industry over our federal government, has effectively driven Democracy out into the hallway where it can tweet all the hand-wringing liberals it wants, because it just doesn't matter anymore. Lobbyists and their cash run the legislative process now. Laws are for sale now, if you have the cabbage.

The only danger to the system is the smart voter,
so politicians use the "Men In Black" rule:
"A person is smart. People are dumb panicky animals,
and you know it."

The shameful drumming of fear into hate and hate into violence, the fracturing of America into hostile camps with the willful use of, well, evil would have sickened Reagan. Right or wrong he knew that bringing people together: in the hope for freedom, in the pursuit of prosperity was the only real way to do,well, good.

Where are we going now, Ronnie? Totalitarian Capitalism?
Do we walk backwards and sit beside China, hunkering down in the dirt to divide the spoils among the warlords and planning the next pogrom?

Senate Deckhand Max Baucus Saves Us

2009-10-02T08:15:00.004-08:00

The line whipped overboard and the big rusty halibut hook grabbed the skipper and pulled him into the cold grey water.

It is one of the nightmare scenarios for Gulf of Alaska fishermen hauling up halibut in the late fall -- a taut line falls out of the block and the weight of fish and anchors pull it back to the bottom fast. Sharp hooks the size of half dollars click on the rail as they fly by.

Leaning over that line is the skipper. Unlike a crab skipper he is out on deck in full raingear, simultaneously driving the boat, controlling the hauler and gaffing the fish that flash up out of the darkness. If one of those flying hooks catches him- by the hand or the hip or the pants leg- it can pull him down under.

In this particular case (a story well known here in Kodiak and often retold in hushed tones at morning mug ups) the crew snapped into action. They threw the line back into the block and pulled the skipper up again, kicking and splashing like a halibut. The skipper used his deck knife and detached himself, but the weight of the water was filling his boots and sweatshirt, and he gasped and struggled as he drifted away from the boat.

One of the deckhands, Dave, acted quickly. Grabbing the throwing line and steel grapple hook he took aim and threw hard, striking the skipper directly in the forehead. The heavy hook bounced off and sank uselessly leaving a bloody dent in the skipper. Dave retrieved the hook and let fly once more, this time bouncing it off the skipper’s bald spot and pulling his raincoat over his head during retrieval. Becoming increasingly agitated, Dave sailed the hook out a third time and managed to pull one of the skipper’s boots off. The next toss was too long and the untethered line wound out completely and sank. Undaunted, Dave grabbed the long gaff hook and held it aloft, proposing to sink it into his skipper’s shoulder and land him like a halibut.

With the last of his strength the skipper waved his hands in surrender.

“No offense, Dave” he coughed “but can somebody else save me for a while?”

This story came to mind as I watched Senator Baucus trying to save us from the insurance companies, or the insurance companies from us, or whatever it is he is doing.

Single Payer was knocked out immediately.
The Public Option stripped of Senatorial support and thrown over the side of the Finance Committee‘s boat.
And now crewman Max has grabbed the mandate gaff. He is ready to sink it into the American uninsured and the American taxpayer and land them for the insurance companies. Companies who openly pay him to do that very thing.

No offense Max, but could someone else save us for a while?

Health Care, Alan Greenspan and The Big Corporation on the Prairie

2009-09-10T08:58:00.007-08:00

We have created a monster.

It is an insatiable soulless entity with the face of Michael Landon and the tentacles of AIG. It is the Supercitizen: the American corporation, with all the legal rights of a human being. It will be in charge of your future health care.

Part of its mythology was shaped by Rose Lane, the daughter of "Little House On the Prairie"'s Laura Ingalls. She made a good living writing trashy celebrity pieces and editing (some say rewriting) her mother's memoirs. In "a white heat" she wrote a libertarian treatise that, along with the works of Ayn Rand, were germinating seeds of a social philosophy that United States federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was able to make an economic reality for eighteen years. Lane and Rand stressed self reliance and personal responsibility and that human endeavor must be free to follow its own path. Rand's novels are heady and strident, but Lane's "Little House" books provide a romantic American background for her ideas. Chief among them are that unencumbered freedom and personal responsibility create their own morality. Their mistake was in welcoming a legal mechanism- the corporation, into the family on the prairie. Greenspan believed in the power of competition to drive honest business practices and that free markets would cause corporations to act in the best long term interests of their shareholders.

A slump shouldered Greenspan admitted to the BBC this week that he was wrong. He went on to say that crises like the one we are in now will inevitably occur in the future because of "human nature". I suggest he is wrong again. They will occur again because we made corporations into citizens. They will occur because of corporate nature.

Which brings us to the President's health care reform speech to a joint session of Congress.

The Democrats roared and stamped, the Republicans shifted and barked like restless chimpanzees and even I was choking up as the President hauled out a deathbed letter from Senator Kennedy and tore into a magnificent end game. He really hit his stride at the end: like Jabbar throwing down skyhooks on a hot night, like Ruth pointing into the bleachers of Congress. He made his foes look petty and foolish, called on his allies to stop bickering and step up and do the right thing.

But whether they chortled in glee or screeched "You lie!", they all seemed to ignore the fact that the President just left the public option firmly tied to the tracks, wide eyed and squirming.

He called the public option just an "idea", just a "means to an end", and said what was important was competition in the market. Surely if the massive corporations wringing the profit out of sickness and death are forced to compete freely they will act in the best long term interests of the shareholders.

Maybe he should take a meeting with Greenspan.

Meanwhile, in the big courtroom across the street, the Supercitizen is shedding his shackles. If the Supreme Court acts as expected it will remove all encumberances to corporate purchase of our "public servants".

And whether you like it or not, my fellow American you are fast becoming more shareholder than citizen.

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousivMolt/idUSTRE5881R720090909
http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2009/08/deregulation-as-crony-capitalism.html
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/08/10/090810crat_atlarge_thurman

Darth Palin and the Imperial Death Panel

2009-09-08T20:47:00.008-08:00

I was talking about health care with Gabrielle LeDoux last year- a real conversation rather than a duel of slogans- it is not an easy subject if you do it right- death and pain and money and fear...

I was of the opinion that health insurance companies have become a defacto monopoly on wellness resources, one that has left us a sicker, poorer nation. I have become convinced that universal access to basic health care needed to be treated like public education or the national defense- something that makes us better as a country. She questioned where the government's obligation begins and ends.

In this context end of life issues came up. The moral obligation we have to the health of our elders and their understandable hesitance to lay helplessly in a hospital bed dying just slowly enough to run through their insurance and children's inheritance while those children watch them suffer long past the point that a loved pet would be put to rest. Gabrielle was of the opinion that a zero quality life with no purpose was not worth living, even if Uncle Sam is paying. Maybe especially then.

I tend to agree, but its not easy to pull the plug on Grandma. The old bird probably made you cookies when you were a kid. If only there were some kind of Death Panel (ideally one manned by bureaucrats with throbbing mutant brains) that could make these decisions for us, pushing numbered buttons that will flush our ailing elders down a series of tubes like bad batteries in the Matrix.

Of course as a Democrat I'm all for it. Thin the collective herd. Lucky for them Alaska's Not Governor, Mrs. Palin, has leaped to their defense.

Seemingly trying to fork more fertilizer on the blossoming career of Shannyn Moore, Mrs. Palin's Facebook writer has stuck to her guns on the existence of the nonexistent Death Panels in the health reform bill, which in actuality is an attempt to establish protocols for advising patients on their options at the end of life. Hospice and pain management and how long you want them to keep your heart beating inside your empty shell are not easy subjects, and the idea is to discuss them with your doctor and your family before you turn into a turnip.

Mrs. Palin's writer (the writing is not bad: clear and concise, unlike this) makes the astonishing assertion that such counseling, even though completely optional, amounts to a threat to the counselee because money for it it is included in a reform bill that also aims to cut costs in health care.

But what kind of counseling are dying people who are in pain getting now? Doesn't it amount to "How much money you got?"

Her writer goes on to question adviser Ezekiel Emanuel's concept of a sort of triage of health resources, concentrating them on those people most likely to get well. This is, at least, a worthy subject: (death and pain and money and fear), and yes, the idea of care being doled out according to your statistical likelihood at recovery is a bit creepy. But these decisions are being made now by computers calculating actuarial tables factoring in "preexisting conditions" and how just much blood can be squeezed from that turnip laying in that expensive hospital bed.

Death and pain and money and fear: that's what health care reform is really about. And at the end of her Facebook post Mrs. Palin's writer does a frightful trick: as a result of Emanuel's "priority curve" she goes on to predict health care "rationing". Of course the poor souls to be rationed don't have any health care at all right now.

The lousy commies.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=116471698434

Enough Dancing Mr President: Its Time to Throw Some Punches

2009-09-07T08:10:00.003-08:00

There is a classic Saturday Night Live skit in which a clever caveman is widely admired by the tribe. Until a jealous hunter bashes in his brains while he sleeps.

"Now Grok is smartest!" the hunter explains to the audience.

The Republican party is sick of Obama being the smartest. And they are trying their hardest to bash in the brains of health care reform with their favorite rock: fear.

Like brimstone preachers they have conjured demons for every pew: health care reform will mean victory for the communists, mass executions of the elderly and will bankrupt the nation.

Mr.Obama they are not going to negotiate.

But it should be pointed out that they are fighting with rocks. They have brought hysterics to a brain fight. Nowadays smarter is stronger.

Get on your feet, Mr. President and step to the middle of the ring. You cannot negotiate this fight. Your opponent is a brute. But if you step up and start jabbing you can take him down. He is fat with lobbyist cash and flush with fearful rage, but the truth can make him sit.

If you abandon the "public option" as easily as you have "single payer" you have chosen to negotiate a fistfight. You are dozing while the caveman raises the rock.

Off Halibut Fishing

2009-08-06T07:24:00.003-08:00

This morning we will put on bait and ice and groceries.
Tonight we will untie the boat and the skipper will steer her between the green and red cans and out, out, out -- away from the dirt and degradation, away from phones and friends and fools who keep us shackled to the ground.
Tomorrow we will hunt for halibut with pieces of pollock and strips of salmon stuck onto big round hooks. Tomorrow while the boat's big wheel chops the water beneath our feet we will bait and bait and bait. Under the aluminum deck shelter the big stereo will pound out an endless playlist while we stand at our stations with fingers flying. A good crabber is strong, agile and relentless. A good longliner is quick, dexterous and relentless. Fueled by coffee and rock and roll, we will pound through the work until its done and the racks are full of baited tubs, like coiled snakes with hundreds of fangs.
We don't drag a big net behind the boat. We will set out our gear late tomorrow night: flags and buoys and big anchors on either end a long line of hooks in the middle. We'll let them soak overnight and haul them the next day, pulling hooks up one at a time, keeping the big flats and carefully releasing what we don't want. Many of the released fish survive (a big carp down south was caught and released over sixty times before it died recently, of natural causes).
The halibut we pack in ice, much the same way they did it a hundred years ago. The quality of halibut, like the red rockfish, is actually improved by its time on ice. We clean and ice the fish as they come aboard, standing around the cleaning table, the furious flappers flinging blood onto our faces, each of us wielding his own favorite knife. Some favor deadly stillettos, some the rounder tipped butcher knives.
After the sets are hauled we will rebait the gear until after midnight, then set again in the early morning hours while we watch a movie (usually a comedy) dialog blazing through the tower speakers we have strapped to the racks.
Then we get a nap. Sleep is a wonderful thing when you really need it.
The next morning, after strong coffees brewed through Mr. Coffee espresso machines, we haul again.
There is a feeling that you get when you step out on deck in the morning- boat moving in the swells under your feet, birds loitering around us, the whales rolling by.
The long, long look to the horizon on such a morning just makes you happy in a way you can't be with your feet in the dirt.

The Biggest Giveaway of All Time: Privatizing the Ocean

2009-07-26T08:17:00.006-08:00

A Study in Contrasts

They call it "the tragedy of the commons".

Its the assumption that anything of value not owned by anyone will be pillaged by everyone. It was the excuse for carving up English commonlands and handing them over to the nobility.

What a great system that was: the kind and wise Earl of Inbreedingham watching over the happy little serfs laboring like Oompa Loompas for a chance to continue to cling to the surface of the planet.

The tragedy of the commons theory assumes two things.
First that the average human is a ravaging beast.
The second is that systems for managing common assets are always corrupt and ineffective (asuumably because they are run by the ravaging beasts).

OK lets save the first for another day. The second is patently false. State and federal governments around the world manage forests and watersheds and airwaves for the benefit of their citizens. The idea that you would throw your hands up and just divvy these assets out for free to the last people who used them is ludicrous.

But that's how we would manage our oceans. Give them away.

On the east coast they are hatching a plan for fishermen to divide up into private clubs. These clubs are made up of people and companies who have "history", or who have fished in the past. These clubs then trade that 'history for ownership of the future fish. All the future fish. Forever.

Taufen's take, always enlightening:

Fishery Councils Coordinate March to Catch Share Systems

Here is a thoughtful look at ocean privatization, done by a professor and read by dozens followed by a cartoon analysis done by a journalist and read by millions. Guess which one will drive policy.

TOWARD RESPONSIBLE FISHERlES POLICY
Daniel W. Bromley
Anderson-Bascom Professor of Applied Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Privatize the Seas

Sarah Vs. Shannyn: Its David and Goliath Again With Same Results

2009-07-26T07:52:00.003-08:00

That is One Huge Forehead

It's Not Sarah's Fault...Just Ask Her

This Article Pegs Palin

2009-07-26T07:31:00.004-08:00

William L. Iggiagruk Hensley is the author of “Fifty Miles From Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People” and former Democratic state senator.
In Alaska, Qiviters Never Win

City of the Future: Kodiak, Alaska

2009-07-24T09:22:00.005-08:00

Mumbai? Shanghai? Pittsburgh? Which of these great cities will dominate the globe thirty years from now?

How about Kodiak?

Yes, Kodiak Alaska, world's most progressive city.
Located on the United States' second biggest island and surrounded by earth's richest waters, Kodiak is a deep water port par excellence, conveniently located outside the frying pan of the coming global meltdown.

Speaking of which, the rapid retreat of Arctic sea ice will make for a reliable over the top trade route very possibly in the next decade. Look at a globe and you'll see Kodiak sitting midway, like a gas station in the middle of the desert. Already the home of the nation's biggest Coast Guard base and a brand new 600 ton Marine Travelift, Kodiak has two working boat harbors and facilities to accommodate container ships, jet airplanes and rocket ships. And we have our own brewery.

Kodiak's hydroelectric and wind power generation capacities should have it at 95% renewable electricity by 2020. Add a little fish oil capacity and we could be 100% oil independant for our power needs. Take that oil-igarchy.

And the people can't be beat. A remarkably diverse community Kodiak enjoys that camaraderie that comes from being trapped on a merciless rock together. Like inmates at Alcatraz.

Or maybe the last cornered humans in a world overrun by zombie banks.

Cage Match: The War of the Prejudices --Sessions vs Sotomayor

2009-07-23T09:06:00.004-08:00

Are You Prejudiced?

Its a trick question. Of course you are. Hey, news flash-- I am prejudiced, you are prejudiced- we all are. Complete objectivity is as far off for us as light speed travel. The little calculator in your cranium is way too small to fit reality into. So we have to guess- to pre-judge. If I see someone coming at me with a knife I might reasonably run away, even though he might just want some cheese.

Judges know this, even if it escapes the egomaniac on the street. Its why we are a nation of laws rather than Kings. A law is an attempt at objectivity. We pool our tiny brains together, testing our prejudices against one another in a constant ongoing process that attempts to shape perfectly objective law-- a goal that can never really be reached.

But that doesn't mean you don't try.

Senator Sessions sees us in a War of the Prejudices. Like too many of us he sees his prejudice as the only shiny clean one. It must win out over the dark prejudices of others.

Judge Sotomayor has been brave enough in her speeches and writing to clearly define her experiences and the world view and, yes, prejudices she has developed. In doing so she does us all a service. Because when she sits down with her fellows on the Supreme Court they will have the best notion of her entire process. And to the extent that they all do so, we will be able to continue to build our system of laws stronger.

So, as Sessions and Party take their extra week to pore over Sotomayor's record you can be sure they will not be bringing back samples of her rulings, but of her speeches. Her rulings show her respect for precedent and her talent for clear analysis. Her speeches show her prejudices and the life experiences and thought processes that shaped them.

We should all be so brave.

The Restless Duck

2009-07-22T06:14:00.005-08:00

She's not a lame duck, really.

She's a restless duck.

Its come to my attention that our soon to be former Governor has a rather short attention span.

I was an early fan (and certainly not alone) when she arrived on the job with a flash of Obama like advocacy: rolling back the oil tax scheme and halting codfish privatization and, ironically, pushing ethics reform.. But then she developed an extreme allergic to the Juneau air.

Its funny that many of her ethics smudges center around her aversion to leave the kids at home and simply go in to work. Her ill advised bullrush at top trooper Monegan over a family matter was embarrassing. But it was her habit of governing by Blackberry from the back porch while "Where's Sarah" signs waved in the streets of the capitol that was really irksome, and harmful to the state.

Then she shrieked like a schoolgirl when handsome Johnny asked her to the Prom. We waited patiently at home while she was on her fling in the lower 48. And when it didn't work out we took her back and hoped for the best.

And now this.

She's breaking up with us.

It's not us, really. Its her. Its just that she's changed. We're a very nice state in a rustic kind of way, and will probably settle down with a fine Governor someday. But she has been in Vogue Magazine and on Fox News and we're...well....Alaska.

Well OK. That's fine. We'll pull on our rubber boots and move on.

And try not to feel dark glee that she might not be able to use her new sugar daddy-- the Lost Tribe of Republicans who hope she will lead them out of their private Egypt-- to pay her legal bills.

Well watch out Lost Tribe. She's a heartbreaker.

Washington Post Article

Or Possibly an Aneurysm

2009-05-27T15:35:00.008-08:00

7:40 PM MAY 21 2009 ---KODIAK
An uneasy hush fell over the Borough Assembly Chambers as I brought my tirade to a close with a flourish and a fleck of foam. The members of the Assembly looked at me as though a bear was hanging over the lectern. I can hear the desperate clicking of the panic buttons hidden under the rim of the mahogany table: buttons that will summon the security gorillas from their basement lair with swinging batons and that pesky straightjacket. My time is short. So I gather my files and folders, leap to the aisle, shuffle sideways through the double doors and jump into the Jeep. I nose the Jeep up Pillar Mountain and park between the titanic feet of tomorrow’s windmills. They’d never look for me here.
They all think I’m crazy. The fools.
I began to hear whispers soon after I started preparations for my campaign for Governor of Alaska.

“Doc thinks you’re crazy.” Branson told me as we waited in line for a latte last Wednesday.
“That’s not a whisper.”
“He thinks you’re suffering from megalomania. Possibly brought on by a brain tumor.”
“Well, in my defense-- megalo is definitely one of the best manias. There have been some very high functioning megalomaniacs. And talk about a fun mania! You rip around all full of confidence and grand designs...”
“I think you’re just drinking too much coffee.”

Crouching over a small brown notebook in the Jeep I sipped my espresso and listened to the hum of electricity to be. Then I fell to work on my great work of literary import- Kodiak: A Play in Three Acts. All the jigsaws are flying recklessly into place.
Soon I will be deep in the Western Gulf, witching whales and putting pieces of Pollock into the great circle of life. Under me, in the black bottom of the sea, a fish awaits his fate.

Kodiak--A Play in Three Acts

2009-02-10T11:57:00.004-09:00

Cast of Characters:

Big Mike: A Deckhand on the fishing vessel Frenzy
Crazy Mike: A Deckhand on the fishing vessel Frenzy
Irish Mike: A trawl Skipper
Hercules: A Crab crewman
Mr. Clean: Skipper of the Frenzy
Senator: A deckhand and rather self important local politician
Birdie: A long suffering bartendress

ACT I:

TIME: A cold winter evening in Kodiak, about 4 PM

SCENE: The R&R Bar, the oldest bar in Alaska. It is a square building the size and shape of a doublewide trailer home, but without the charm. It is constructed of ancient soggy logs from the Russian era. Two doors offer entry: the front door between two windows, stage left and the side door next to a dumpster that is visible stage right. An old U shaped bar dominates the right side. There is a single pool table and a couple of dart boards on the left.

AT RISE: Seated at the bar are Big Mike, Crazy Mike and the Senator. Irish Mike and Hercules are playing pool. The bar is smokey and sporadically lit with dim lights. Irish Mike, a wiry man in fleece pants and a sweatshirt, is orbiting the pool table, eyeballing different shots and muttering. Hercules, a very large shaggy man wearing a tattered fleece jacket is standing still, regarding Irish Mike with a flat, emotionless gaze.Though he is inside, his ragged hood is pulled over his head. This, along with his long hair and beard, give him a leonine appearance. At the bar Crazy Mike is gesturing wildly at the wall mounted television set. Big Mike and the Senator, holding pints of beer, are watching him.

BIRDIE: Four twenty five, Crazy Mike.
CRAZY MIKE: (Taking the beer without paying, pointing at the television.) There! Right there! Did you see it? Her eyes flashed red like a demon! I tell you Nancy Pelosi is the Devil! Sometimes you can see the leathery wings folded behind her head. She has a scaly neck. Like an alligator.
BIG MIKE: That's just Fox News, Crazy Mike. What they do is they use flash images to burn a subtextural tapestry on the walls of your eyeballs. That way the overlaid lies all weave together seamlessly. Also, have you ever noticed how much darker President Obama is on Fox?
SENATOR: Darker? How? How can they make him darker?
BIG MIKE: That's easy. They use a dark filter on the camera. Same shot on CNN Obama looks like Arthur Ashe. On Fox he looks like Wesley Snipes. Everyone behind him is darker, too. The Caucasians look like Latinos, the Chinese Americans turn into Cambodians, and the Pakistani Americans all look like African Americans. So to the Fox viewers , namely frightened old white people, it looks like an army of minorities coming out of the television to get them, like bloodthirsty zombies. Really, this is what Fox does best. They push the fear button, and people love it. Its like slasher movies and roller coasters, once you get a taste for it you keep coming back for the thrill of the chill. And when Dick Cheney is on TV, (shivers) now that's scary.
SENATOR: Sometimes I wonder why you are Big Mike and he is Crazy Mike. Because you are not that much bigger than he is and sometimes a lot crazier.
CRAZY MIKE: That's right. Why do I have to be Crazy Mike? You know it would be so cool if someday somebody would just call me Mike. My friends used to call me Mike. My Mom used to call me Mike. Now its "Good Morning Crazy Mike. Here's your beer, Crazy Mike..."
BIRDIE: Four twenty five Crazy Mike. (He gives her a stunned look.)
BIG MIKE: Your Mom calls you Crazy Mike?
CRAZY MIKE: I think she may have started it.
SENATOR: (Interrupting) Look, Crazy Mike, its simple practicality. There are just way too many Mikes in this town. Plus Kodiak is an island, so there's no way for all the Mikes to spread out. If you stuck your head out that door and yelled "Mike!" half the heads in the boat harbor would turn around. So every Mike has to have a title. So he's Irish Mike (waving to where Irish Mike is still orbiting and muttering) he's Big Mike and you're Crazy Mike. (Counting on his fingers) And then there's Minnesota Mike, and Stupid Mike and all the Mikes you identify by boat they work on, like Winona Mike and Serenity Mike and Predator Mike and the guys who dropped the Mike entirely, like Elway and the Weasel and uh... hey what is Hercules' real name? (Points toward Hercules)
BIG MIKE: I think its Hercules
CRAZY MIKE: I still don't see why I have to be Crazy ... There! Right there! I saw the wings! They flash at the same time as the claws!
BIRDIE: Four twenty five Crazy Mike.
CRAZY MIKE: Aw, just put it on my tab, Birdie!
BIRDIE: You don't have a tab. No more tabs.
CRAZY MIKE: What? Since when?
BIRDIE: Since you guys don't pay. Also no more personal loans and no more mail held for over a year.
CRAZY MIKE: We just started fishing, Birdie. Most of the fleet hasn't even been paid yet. Now no more tabs? Now? This place is the fisherman's haven. Its right across the street from the boat harbor. (Drinks from beer wistfully) Why, the steady trade of the thirsty, hardworking fisherman is the very life's blood of this fine establishment. It always has been, Birdie. For nearly a hundred years, now. Whalers came to this bar for a beer! Whalers! And now you're going to tell me a poor deckhand with a dry mouth can't slake his hot thirst today and repay when he gets paid, I'd say tomorrow, or maybe the next day?
BIG MIKE: Dude, that was a poem
BIRDIE: Four twenty five, Longfellow Mike
CARCASS: (Bursting in through the dumpster-side door) Drinks! Drinks! Drinks for all my friends! (His voice is raspy, like he gargles with battery acid. He walks to a large brass bell hung over the bar and begins to ring it boisterously.) Glory! Glory to us my friends for I have been paid, and I'm rich for a day!Drinks for alllllllll my friends! (He gestures expansively to include all five patrons, including Hercules, who has not moved. He has been observing silently, his cue stick held to his chest with both hands, his expression stern. Carcass crosses to him) Hercules! hows it hangin', Tiny? Have a beer with me! (He claps him on the shoulders like he's beating a rug, and with a similar amount of dust. Hercules nods and leans his cue against the wall. Birdie has already set new beers in front of Big Mike, Irish Mike, and the Senator.)
CRAZY MIKE: I'll take another Liquid Sunshine, Birdie.
BIRDIE: Carcass is payin' for the one you just drank. (She is getting beers for Hercules and Carcass.)
CRAZY MIKE: Aw, c'mon Birdie. Carcass, I already drank the beer you just bought me.
CARCASS: Another beer for my friend Crazy Mike!
CRAZY MIKE: Ah hah! Thank you my good friend, you are a scholar and a gentleman. A liquid Sunshine and a shot of Chivas please, Bernie.
BERDIE: He didn't say anything about a shot.
CARCASS: Shots for everyone! (He gestures expansively with his beer and there is general acclamation.)

(MR. CLEAN enters through the front door. He is immaculate, from his clean cannery logo baseball cap down to his high tech tennis shoes. He brushes his shoulders and looks down at his shoes as he carefully shuffles them on a cocoa mat set inside the door. He looks toward the bar and shakes his head disapprovingly. Making an exaggerated hands-held-open-in-amazement gesture, he crosses to the bar.) Guys, guys, guys...what's going on? Its four o'clock in the afternoon, I come down to the boat, and nobody is there! I didn't know what to think. I got the parts in my hand, I'm all ready to go, and no crew. I didn't... you know, I didn't, well its just lucky this is the first place I looked, that's all.
CRAZY MIKE: That is lucky.
BIG MIKE: And a lucky guess on your part too.
CARCASS: A beer and a shot for Mr. Clean! (There is a clamor of agreement. Mr. Clean is visibly offended by the smell of Carcass.)
MR. CLEAN: No no no now boys we have the parts now. We better go rebuild that pump.
CRAZY MIKE: (Excitedly) You left to get those parts at 9:30 in the morning! The hydraulic shop is a hundred yards away. I bet you changed your tennis shoes twice and had eight lattes since then. We're down on the boat waiting for you, retying gangions and painting everything slow enough to catch while you hang aroung the ramp telling the same idiotic story to every fool who walks by. I bet it took you four hours to get across the street!
MR. CLEAN: You are this close to getting fired, buddy. And let me tell you right now, if you make me fire you in the middle of the season you will never work in this town again.
CRAZY MIKE: Hah. You don't scare me. I've been blackballed in this town more times than I've been 86'd for life outta this bar!
BIRDIE: Here's your drinks, Mr. Clean.
MR. CLEAN: I don't want any drinks and don't call me Mr. Clean. Why does everyone call me that? (They look at each other and themselves. Except for Birdie everyone is dressed like a greasy hobo.) Why can't you just call me my name?
BIG MIKE: What is your real name?
MR. CLEAN: Mike.
BIRDIE: Here's your beer, Mike.
MR. CLEAN: I don't want...(They are pushing him toward the beer.) I have the parts now...
BIG MIKE: Tell you what. If you can drink that beer faster than Hercules here, we will go down to that boat right now and rebuild that pump. But if he wins we're done for the day.
MR. CLEAN: (Smiling) No one can drink a beer faster than I can. No one.
BIG MIKE: So you have claimed.
MR. CLEAN: (Still smiling) OK then, c'mon big boy. (They both drink. Mr. Clean clearly wins.)
MR. CLEAN: Allllll-right boys, let's go. (He is already noticibly looser.)
BIG MIKE: Two out of three.
MR. CLEAN: No way. Let's go. (He starts to roll toward the door)
BIG MIKE: Two out of three and if we win we stay up all night remeasuring the buoy lines.
MR. CLEAN: Why? What's wrong with them?
BIG MIKE: Nothing. I'm just saying.
Mr.CLEAN: I knew it! I knew it about the buoy lines!I can see you guys laughing when you set them. Laughing and looking up at the wheelhouse! Why are you laughing?
IRISH MIKE: Maybe they're stoned.
BIG MIKE: I'm just saying....
MR. CLEAN: Alright, alright, you're on! You're on! You guys are gonna be rebuilding and remeasuring all night long! (Birdie sets two more in front of them. Again Mr. Clean clearly wins.)
Lez go now, lez go! (He waves awkwardly toward the door but no one moves. He wavers to his feet.)
BIG MIKE: No no, its two out of three, you have to drink three.
MR. CLEAN: OK OK alright. Set em up, hurry up, gotta build a pump. (Birdie sets up two more and again Mr. Clean wins handily.) Lez go, lez go! (He staggers toward the door and falls down.)
IRISH MIKE: Fastest drinker in town, and the biggest lightweight in the state. (Mr. Clean is up on his knees, looking unsteady)
CRAZY MIKE: And he always forgets. He drinks fast, he blacks out--complete mind erase. The next day he's so embarrassed he never says a word. Never asks what happened.
BIG MIKE: (Lifting Mr. Clean and setting him back on the barstool.) Whoa whoa let's get you back up here Mr. Cleanio. Hey didn't you just order another round? I don't think Birdie heard you.
MR. CLEAN: Nother round, Birdie. I'm the winner!
BIRDIE: Yes, you are. You want a shot or should I just hit you over the head with a rubber mallet?
Stay tuned for ACT II

A Conference of Fish Doctors

2009-02-02T07:43:00.013-09:00

(Dr. L, Bristol Bay Bill and Swampsy Mike)

"What's the hell's a swampsy?"
asked the man in the cellophane jacket.

"Carnivorous bog rat." interrupted the priest. "Native to Aus-traaaah-lia."

"No no" I held my hand up, "SWAMC. The Southwest Alaska Municipal Conference. We try to advance the collective interests of the people, businesses and communities of Southwest Alaska."
"Oh yeah?" said Cellophane "Sounds like a bunch of commies."
"Hah." the priest laughed "Buncha minor officials is what they are--clappin' each other on the backs and crying about 'infrastructure'."
"Yeah that's us, I geuss. Well, mostly we cry about fish and fuel."
"I see." said Cellophane "So now you're here to cry in your beers."

Mr. Cellophane and the priest were orbiting like moons around the Jupiter sized table the Swampsies had successfully colonized in the Humpy's Alehouse System of the Downtown Anchorage Galaxy.

"Oh no. No beer crying. This is the most important part of the Conference. The Post Conference Conference. The PCC. Get away from the stiff backed chairs and bounce ideas of each other like tennis balls. We have people from Kodiak, Dutch Harbor, Bristol Bay, the Aleutians...look we even brought the good doctor. Hey, Dr. L.!"
" Father, Mr. Cellophane, this is Dr. John Lynham."

Dr.Lynham is an economist. I'm glad we were able to persuade him to join us. It is important to encourage economists to swim in the sea of humanity. Economics is second only to astrophysics for pure dark robed mountaintop mysticism. They are the money philosophers, divining smoky truths from scant data for the benefit of awed minor officials like ourselves. Dr. Lynham is a good egg, though. He is from the University of Hawaii, by way of New Zealand and Ireland, with an accent from one or more of those strange places. But he is an islander, so I have hopes of convincing him how terribly wrong he is. He is among a growing tide of scientists, ecologists and corporations who are encouraging us to privatize the sea.

At the Conference Dr. Lynham showed us a series of graphs and tables and color glossy photographs that seemed to show that IFQs or "Catch Shares" can save the world's fisheries by giving them permanently to private individuals and corporations. The theory here is that if you own something you take better care of it. Kind of like Hertz giving away a car to the next renter because it is tired of fender benders. The whole media blitz for "Catch Shares" is centered around a fancy reader friendly e-report called "Oceans of Abundance" put out by the muscular "market-based-approach" ecogroup Environmental Defense .

Dr. Seth Macinko of the University of Rhode Island, who was Dr. L's counterpart on the stage that afternoon, had a different take. He makes the point that no one talks about permanently giving away all the trees, oil and minerals to the companies that extract them today. And that the federal law states expressly that no ownership rights to fish can be conferred. That in fact the privilege to take fish from the sea can be taken away at any time. In fact in a paper he wrote in 2002 with David Bromley, he seems to question whether the federal government itself can act as "owner" of the ocean. I had hoped to convince Dr. M to join us at Humpy's, but he was not feeling well after the banquet (I hope it wasn't the shrimp).

Southwest Alaska has already seen what privatization brings. In Bristol Bay today fishermen pay a fee of seventy percent of ex-vessel price to people and corporations on the shore for the privilege of harvesting the nation's crab. A thousand fishermen lost their chance to make a living. After taxes levied for a boat buyback program and administrative costs, the working fishermen that remain, the ones you see on TV, are working for one quarter share. There are still good guys out there: boats still paying full share to their skippers and crew. But there is a terrible temptation to charge the highest possible lease to the working fishermen- just enough so they can make boat payments and insurance, maybe pay the crew a little and hope that fuel prices don't go up.

Dr. Macinko has an idea about limited duration Catch Shares that would have all the advantages of the system: a slower, safer, easier to manage fishery with a higher quality end product, without permanent allocation. I have debated the merits with him many times. I was hoping to get both doctors here so they could have a brain duel, just like the movie "Scanners". But as I watch the Dutch Harborians surround Dr. L I think it might be a worthwhile PCC after all.

Yep, economists are a funny bunch. To even enter the field you must have a semi-masochistic desire to understand the unknowable: the bright universe of human endeavor. No amount of graphs or color glossies can describe it. Sometimes the closest glimpse might be at Humpy's between the good beer and the bad harmonica.

http://www.yale.edu/ccws/Macinko.html
http://www.edf.org/article.cfm?contentID=8791
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/321/5896/1678

Bad Poetry Cafe, Vol. 1

2009-01-06T11:38:00.004-09:00

Sumo Buddha

No direction
Misconception
A thousand points of darkness
Downstream on a river of pure aggression
Minnows into sharkness
What is right and who is wrong
Fight the fight or go along
Its like Buddha in the Sumo ring
The roaring crowd
Is much more loud
Than the choir in his head can sing.

"Now here is life on the halfshell nut"
he says to himself as he's kicked in the gut
"Laid out languid or pinprickle fury-
these are my choices? (Don't call me Shirley)
Stinging bee and honeyed hive-
Its a study in contrasts just being alive"
Pinning his opponent with a peaceful piledriver
He says "You are alive
But I am aliver"

The Jobs Americans Don't Want To Do

2009-01-02T20:20:00.007-09:00

How to Lose Your Soul by Not Using Your Hands

It was 8:45 AM, March of 2008. I was slumped into a convention chair on the holo-deck of the Washington DC Hilton, listening to a slight, scholarly lady talk about immigration policy. The morning's latte was dancing a slow waltz in my head with the ghosts of the previous evening's martinis. All around me dellow felegates from the National League of Cities' annual descent upon the nation's capitol sipped coffee or dozed under ten gallon hats as the lady, Tamar Jacoby, argued that Joe Farmer needs access to cheap foreign labor, i.e. illegal aliens.

Then she said something that pulled me up in my seat. Little alarms were going off in my brain, so I looked down on my notebook to see what righty had written. Ms. Jacoby had said:
"A large percentage of them work in dirty, demeaning, low paid jobs that native born Americans no longer want to do: busboys, chambermaids, farmhands, nurses' aides, sweatshop workers, on the assembly line, in meat packing plants."

I shook the martini ghosts out of my head and listened. She described an America that is older and more educated, and not willing to do "unskilled work". I look down on my own rough and misshapen hands. Hmmmm.

She goes on to make the case that the American of tomorrow will be heady and shiny, graduating with honors along with his friends and classmates, festooned all over with gold stars and blue ribbons, comparing their trophies for participation at the mall where they consume the proper products in languidly prowling packs, waiting for the day when they will be placed in a skilled, non demeaning positions of oblique responsibility. Obviously these uber-Americans will need unskilled, uneducated foreigners to clear the plates, harvest the corndogs and empty the chamberpots.

At first I thought I' was just offended by the idea of an underclass, a shadow segment of our society with a hungry belly that the rest of us rule because of their need to fill it.
But there's something more. We are also hurt by our own aversion to simple physical work.
This didn't really strike home to me until the recent "financial crisis" began to unwind. For years my wife has been asking me what it is Americans do, exactly. Most of us (If WalMart wages aren't sucking you into the underclass) seem to make a living providing services to other Americans. Chefs, CPAs and surgeons all charge each other enough to make a sweet living. "But if so few of us actually make anything," my wife asked "where does all the money come from?"
"I don't know." I replied "Maybe its the savings from all the illegal beef butchers and diaper changers."

It turns out some of our most skilled and educated financiers conspired to build a house of mirrors that crashed under the weight of its own reflections. What they did to the entire world should be criminal, but instead we have chosen to open our forgiving arms and wallets to these prodigals.

But the original prodigal son was contrite. Ours have flown back to Daddy unrepentant, in sleek private jets, sheepishly grinning fops with silk hankies who need a new stake after foolishly gambling away their ready cash. Of course Daddy is broke too, so the sharecoppers in the valley will have to pony up Junior's bailout because, after all, if he can't generously spread his money around how shall the little people survive?

Well I have news for the dandies of high finance. You are the little people. I know working people here in Kodiak who came from Mexico and Guatemala and the Phillipines who work their whole lives gutting fish and sorting mail who have more honor and nobility than a thousand bailout sucking CEOs. Their character is the true bedrock of our society, and it is built from dirty hands and sore backs.

And isn't true value created by the one who catches the fish, builds the car and invests in the factory? That's real capitalism. You work to make or do something and are paid a purchase price or wage. Then you take that money and risk it to make more. The emerging pseudo capitalism in which morbidly obese corporations are "too big to let them fail" neatly combines the worst aspects of Marxism and fascism. Corpogovernment will preserve our failing businesses like Lenin's waxy corpse for the good of the people. But what should we expect from a culture that no longer values the contributions of those who actually do something? Somehow we got it backwards. We seem to believe that money makes people and that character comes from strength.

You know it is ever true that the best of us, he kindest, those with real patience and generosity seem invariably to be those who have known real hardship and adversity. If you ask me every kid in America should have to work in the sweatshop before he gets his Gap t shirt. And every financial executive who gets a bailout should carry chamberpots for lettuce pickers.

Change is Good

2008-12-15T10:40:00.002-09:00

Fish Council Tackles Ratz Problems

The North Pacific Management Council takes on another tough issue: How to fix perceived problems with the Crab rationalization Program. Its a wrestling match, but the Council as it sits today seems willing to find ways to address crew issues and adjust the processor quota aspect of the Crab Fishery Management Plan.

Its going on right now. I'll be back on later with details.

News Flash- Bush Will Never Pardon Ted Stevens

2008-11-29T09:59:00.004-09:00

"Bush" or the Justice Department that is made in his image, went after him in the first place

Scuttlebutt has always centered on a certain Native Corporation that Uncle Ted helped to get a no-bid contract to supply cell phones in Iraq. The phones were second hand Fisher-Price Big Bird models that would only connect you to Elmo, or some such. At any rate Phonegate added to a pile of embarrassing contractor scandals in Iraq, and it was one of the only ones in which Cheney wasn't involved. Add that to Stevens' "Don't pet me, I bite." charm, and we find a Republican Mr. Bush is quite happy to see the J-Dog clamp onto.. Bush let the beast off its leash in the first place.

So don't look for a Presidential pardon for Uncle Ted. W. has himself to worry about.

A complete look at the pillaging of both Iraq and the US taxpayer by contractors and their Congressional enablers, including Ted's Big Cell Phone Adventure:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PBZ/is_6_86/ai_n27084061?tag=rel.res1

The Sword Over Bristol Bay's Head

2008-11-18T08:34:00.008-09:00

A corporation is a one eyed slobbering beast that will chase a dollar over a cliff. Sure, they have their uses, like the trolls in the Lord of the Rings. But you should not put them in charge of long term planning..

Case in point: the impending ruination of the vast watershed that feeds the Bristol Bay.

Alaskans failed to pass a referendum this year that would have simply required mines to not poison groundwater. As a result a lake of poisonous sludge held back by one of the earth's biggest dams will be poised at the headwaters of the Kvichak, keystone river of the Bristol Bay red salmon run, so that the Pebble Miners can dig one of the biggest holes in the world. (Click illustration at bottom)

Now the BLM has decided to open a million acres of the wide river drainage downstream, effectively tearing down the last fences that protect a run of fish that is perhaps the world's most fantastic renewable resource. Millions of pounds of the finest food imaginable comes back every year, unless we poison them, which, apparently, we will. (Click story below)

I grew up in California's Sacramento River valley. One hundred years ago they were where Bristol Bay is now. Mining moved in on a salmon run that filled the rivers. After a couple of dams and a whole lot of extraction the fish are down to a trickle. Today, after Herculean effort, the winter run of king salmon on the Sacramento river is finally coming out of single digits, at an expense to the taxpayer of forty thousand dollars per fish. (Click story below)

Ah, yes, the Iron Mountain Mine. Like Pebble, it was seen as an economic boon to the region. They dug deep into the rocky hills at the headwaters of the Keswick. Today, even as we speak, it is exuding a smoking acidy poison that defies description. It may never stop leaking out, not in human memory. The strange bacteria that survive there have been used by scientists to show that life might exist on other planets, where "life as we know it" could not.

Will we learn from the past, or just grunt, put our heads down, and follow that dollar?

http://www.adn.com/money/story/592844.html

http://www.earthjustice.org/library/references/sacbee_winter_run_salmon.pdf

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/specials/mining/26996_damage12.shtml

Here's a chart of the area, courtesy of the Anchorage Daily News:

http://community.adn.com/mini_apps/assetDisplay/?ref=http://media.adn.com/smedia/2008/11/18/00/505-18BLM_BristolBay.graphic_large.prod_affiliate.7.gif&summ=&sec=171&width=528&height=568

Senator Elton Says It All

2008-11-10T09:59:00.002-09:00

I was going to blog rhapsodic on how much Alaska's political circumstances have suffered since our Governor's recent tour throwing gravel encrusted slushballs at every one who is now in power in Washington DC.

But Alaska's State Senator Kim Elton has already written it, much better than I could. Link on the piece below for a thoughtful look at our new reality:

http://alaskareport.com/news1108/x61752_elton_different.htm

Crab Ratz Problems Well Known Before Implementation

2008-11-07T09:09:00.003-09:00

Almost Five Years Ago---The Northern Fish Council Ignored Working Fishermen Then, Too

Here is the naively worded testimony I provided the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council in early 2004, before implementation of Crab Ratz. The fact that none of the socially destructive aspects of Crab Ratz have been addressed to this day is a sad commentary itself.

North Pacific Fisheries Management Council

Re: BUY BACK MY BACK

First of all, I would like to thank you, the North Pacific Fisheries Management council, for waking me up. I had been asleep, and the cold bucket of water that was your crab rationalization plan left me blinking, sputtering, and drenched in outrage.

Because, to me, the rationalization behind rationalization isn’t rational. As a guy who first crabbed in 1984, who has banged and shoveled many tons of salt water ice, hooked and pulled through thousands of buoy setups, pushed, tied and clambered over hundreds of stacks of pots, and dealt on a personal basis with processors, skippers and boat owners, I felt I might be in a position to point out certain errors in the plan’s most basic logical underpinnings.

To wit:
The awarding of permanent buying privileges to a limited number of processors is not justified. If the vessel buyback program is sufficient compensation for the overcapitalization of boat owners, then a similar one time buyback program should suffice for the overcapitalization of processors. To step into the arena of the giving and taking away of freedoms, rights and privileges in a free society should not be the job of the Council, only the management of fisheries. To award buyer’s privileges to these entities is, I think, best understood in terms of the stripping the right of everyone else to buy fish. To extend this thinking logically everyone in the industry should be frozen in place, from cannery workers to deckhands, skippers and owners. Is it the intent of the Council to create a permanent caste system? I don’t think it is, so the Council must reconsider this awarding of the market to an anointed few.

Since the days of the daring Dutchmen in what was then New Amsterdam, free trade has been the engine that powers America. To create Lords of Commerce in the fishing industry is to apply a medieval solution to a modern problem. The Justice Department has numerous reservations about Processor Shares and has predicted a sticky goo of lawsuits. I must concur.

The elimination of consideration for crew, and the minimal consideration offered to skippers is not justified. Every argument offered to support the awarding of shares to processors applies to skippers and crew, who pay, on average, 40% of a boats daily operating expenses plus the cost of their own equipment, and the investment of many hours of labor, for what is only a chance to make money. If they were wage earners, with the owners taking all the risk, making all the investment, and therefore taking all the profit, there would be no claim. But they aren’t. Fishing is a venture, undertaken by contractually linked businessmen, three quarters of which are skippers and crew. The Justice Department hasn’t studied this aspect of rationalization, but surely a similar sticky goo of lawsuits is lurking in the wings for this, too.

I’m an old man, nearly 43, and I thought the sight of me, bent over my cane as I shuffle painfully up the long stairways to attend the meetings might engender a sympathetic ear on the part of the Council. What I have come to learn is that the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council is not so much a forum of the minds as an advocacy platform. In its well meaning desire to defer to the wishes and concerns of the industry, the Council has formed policy based on the interests of those groups most forcefully represented in the hallways, at the breakfast tables, and in the seats of the Council itself.

I expected to find fire breathing dragons and evil wizards at work when I first began attending Council meetings. To my surprise I spoke to a continuous stream of pleasant, intelligent, engaging people who were doing nothing more or less than their jobs, which was to represent their own interests and those of their employers. Processors, well-informed, well-funded, and well represented on the Council, mounted an impressive campaign, and are now a driving force in the process. Fledgling Skipper/Crew groups like the Gulf Groundfish Fisherman’s Association, the Crewman’s Association and the swelling Deep Sea Fisherman’s Union will probably grow up too late to join the big boys on the field before the game is over.

Still, the potential for backlash is enormous. Every lawsuit, every protest, every disparate group with an axe to grind at the Council’s table has the potential to further slow a process that can be tracked by counting the rings in its trunk. I therefore suggest these two changes:

1. That the number of processors allowed to buy fish in Alaska not be limited. A simple buyback program, in which excess processors would be bought out by those remaining, would be better still.

2. That a “Buy Back My Back” program be implemented to compensate long term participants in the industry:
A long term participant is defined as a skipper or crewman who fulfils his/her full seasonal contractual obligations.
The fund would have two tiers: one for Skipper/Crew participants during the qualifying IFQ years, and one for ongoing participants in the rationalized fishery.

Qualifying participants in the first tier would be assigned one point for each of the IFQ qualifying years in which he fulfils his contractual obligation. Acknowledging that Skipper/Crew often move from boat to boat while requiring contractual fulfillment for qualification recognizes the fluid nature of skipper/crew employment dynamic, while also recognizing the importance of dependable professionals. Qualified participants would receive a one time payment, amount depending on number of points, funded in a way similar to the vessel buyback program. This purpose of this payment would be to enable excess Skipper/Crew to leave the industry, or for those wishing to remain to buy into the industry.

The second tier would be comprised of present day contracted skipper/crew. Upon fulfilling his seasonal contract, he would be signed off by the boat owner and would receive a yearly dividend. The creation of a subsidized health insurance program as an alternate to a dividend could best bring permanent long term benefits to the community of fishers.

Such a program would address issues of equitable distribution of the resource to all stakeholders in the industry as well as fostering a stable, professional pool of contractors for the industry. I strongly urge that these changes be seriously considered as you refine the alternatives for GOA Groundfish and implement the BSAI crab rationalization plan.

I’m sorry I won’t be able to join you for this meeting. I know you’ll miss me. Right now I smell so strongly of squid juice that the automatic doors at Safeway open 25 feet before I arrive. I therefore officially support the efforts of Mr. Kwatchka of the GGFA, Mr. Soma of the DSFU, and the testimony supplied by Mr. Branson of the Crewman’s Association.
Thank You, Terry Haines

Almost five years ago, and the same issues sit on the table while our fishing communities suffer.

The Red Faced State

2008-11-05T07:35:00.008-09:00

Alaska Says: "No We Can't!"

It turns out Don Young is right. Alaskans are the dumbest people on the planet.

And Mr. Young is going back to Washington.

McCain/Palin also easily carried the state, even though the twitchy Mr. McCain often seemed more like a contestant on "Deal or No Deal" than potential commander in chief, especially when he opened the Sarah Palin briefcase. And Mrs. Palin, who seemed to be doing a fine job as governor, didn't seem very presidential lying on the canvas at the feet of the pixieish Katie Couric.

McCain/Palin employed the classic Republican 72 hour blitz strategy. Knowing that the opposition has little time to respond, the candidate saves the most outrageous and gut wrenching ads for the three days just before the election. But, to his credit, I think Annakin McCain was conflicted to the end, and seemed to hold back the worst dogs in his kennel. Mrs. Palin certainly chaffed at her restraints. Alaska's rogue diva whipped chanting and booing crowds into a foamy frenzied meringue that now amounts to a national fan club.

Mrs. Palin has come to to relish the roar of the crowds, and is less conflicted. She will come back to Wasilla not a lame duck, but a restless one.

Don Young's 72 hour blitz was more effective. "I know Alaska." the grizzled grump said, and I guess he's right. Bombing the voters with a last minute ad campaign that claimed Berkowitz would immediately institute a 190 percent tax increase and become Nancy Pelosi's butler, the old warhorse has cruised over the finish line buoyed by the flow of panicking sheep.

Mr. Young's problem is in two years he has to do it all over again. As he continues to channel hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions to DC lawyers, desperately challenging a sea of Justice Department evidence line by line, he has to be wondering if the contributions can keep up. He is no longer chairman of anything, and many Republicans resent the King of Earmarks for tarnishing the brand.

Maybe its right that Young and Stevens return to Washington to face their peers and the prosecutors and the press. But its not good for Alaska. The Senate majority leader has promised ethics hearings for Mr. Stevens, should he return, and even senior Republicans are predicting he would be booted out. In that case a special election will be held to replace him.

Now hang on.

I know Mrs. Palin can't appoint herself as Uncle Ted's successor, but surely she can run for it in the special election.

Senator Sarah?

"I am Oz the Um, Great and Uh...Powerful..."

2008-10-30T09:09:00.006-08:00

How many of the citizens of Oz wanted to lynch Dorothy when she pulled down the curtain and exposed the Wizard?

Let's face it, the illusion had been working pretty well.

Here in Alaska Palin the Great and Powerful had the people praising her and the Legislature on a leash. Likewise, Uncle Ted, the Wizard of Washington, conjured up golden earmarks for the grateful peasants.

These days there is a definite mood of Dorothy hatred wafting through the state.

Did we really want to know about the governor's efforts to sell herself nationally using an east coast PR firm, paid for by the state? Or that she has charged Alaska a daily fee to work from home? Or that she charged the state to fly her kids around with her to events and put them up in hotels so they could act in "official capacity" such as drawing a raffle ticket, and sometimes just popping up with kids in tow, like that friend who obliviously shows up at an adult party with her children: "Hi! What do you have for the kids to do?"

No. Nobody really wants to know about that stuff, and its embarrassing that the whole world knows, too. Its hard to not resent the McCain campaign for luring her out into the spotlight.
On the other hand truth is good. A big wave is going to roll through Alaska politics, and we will see which boats stay afloat.

Uncle Ted's troubles amount to a second wave of change. He has pointed an angry finger his prosecutorial Dorothys for their bumbling, and some foolish minor obfuscation. But even if you judge the case by what uncle Ted himself admitted on the witness stand, well, let's face it, he accepted gifts and merchandise and did not write them down on the form. Case closed.

Even if reelected he will return to the US Senate nicked as no Senator before him, to a Democratic controlled Congress and a fractured Republican minority that has largely turned its back to him.

Hopefully the majority of the electorate will see the wisdom of sending Begich in. The old quarterback has had his day, and taken too many hits lately.
http://www.slate.com/id/2203348/
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081021/ap_on_el_pr/palin_family_travel

Good News! The Rest of the World is Even More Screwed Up Than Us!

2008-10-28T08:24:00.005-08:00

Dollar Steers World Economy into Telephone Pole--

But Is Only One Wearing Seat Belt

Don't start converting to euros yet.

In an ironic twist to the global financial crisis it looks like the the good old greenback is back on top. We got the world hooked on bindles of high risk head rush real estate derivatives. But now that the inevitable telephone pole of reality has jumped in front of the car we have our financial Betty Ford Clinics already built. The rest of the world does not.

We've been there before. FDR and friends had to nurse the financial system back after it had gotten way too high and crashed hard in 1929. The first couple of tough love years that followed saw a third of Americans lose the money in their bank accounts and a 25% unemployment rate. Like today's Europe and Asia they had no net. The FDIC and other "socialist" institutions FDR built to dry out a wasted economy are still in place, thankfully. But the rules that hold the European Union together specifically restrict the kind of emergency "injections" we are giving our junkie banks right now. Their Ad Hoc solutions directly challenge the system which is the basis of their currency. And Asian markets are still learning how to drive the capitalism car out of a ditch. Once again everyone wants dollars.

So we are saved by our own schizophrenia. We tossed out all the rules so we could snort up all the subprime mortgages we wanted, but we never moved out of Mom's house, so she can clean us up and put us back on our feet now that we smashed up the family car. But where does that leave us? Do we go right back on a bender as soon as our strength returns, or stay safe in Mommy's arms?

Greenspan the freemarketeer is humbled now. It turns out you do need some rules after all. And Galbraith the "socialist" is correct to point out that our system of "wealth distribution" is the net that will save us from 1930 happening all over again. But let's hope the bailout doesn't turn us into a lockdown economy, with federal intervention at every step. And let's hope we learned, along with Greenie, that even a free market needs some rules.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10242008/transcript2.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/business/worldbusiness/05euro.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aF6npULt3NT8&refer=home

Details of the Halibut Split

2008-10-27T09:41:00.002-08:00

Charter Gets Capped and Triggered

Here is the link to the NPFMC Newsletter explaining the new caps on charter halibut catches in areas 2C and 3A.

Scuttlebutt says it will be challenged in court.

http://www.fakr.noaa.gov/npfmc/newsletters/NEWS1008.pdf

Joe Sixpack Hates Commies

2008-10-21T05:04:00.009-08:00

The McCain/Palin campaign is furiously pressing hotbuttons now, trying to get voters to turn off their brains and run to the polls with a fire in their guts.

Last week they hammered on one of mine: "redistribution of wealth". This week they added two more to the stump speeches: "socialism" and "welfare state". They know very well that free market yee-hah John Wayne capitalists like me hate and fear those words and the intrusive and expensively bureaucratic European style government they bring to mind.

But of course that's not what we're talking about. Obama is in favor of rescinding the Bush era tax cuts for the more successful among us, and would in fact give a tax cut to the other ninety five percent. McCain has described this shifting of the tax burden as redistribution of wealth. But neither like to talk about the real point:

We're broke, baby.

It's not about a fair and equitable tax rate that allows all Americans to prosper and does not punish success. We all want that. It's about the fact that the United States of America is mind bogglingly deep in debt and if we can't start paying some of it down China is gonna send someone over to repossess the country.

And the simple truth is the "middle class"-- neck deep in charge card debt, with their retirement suddenly shrunken and kids in college on credit, is pretty well squeezed out. Its not that we wouldn't like to get more out of them. But Joe Sixpack is as broke as the government.

And, I can't help but think that we just bailed out the millionaires when they needed help. The USA needs a bailout now. Maybe if Exxon Mobil and Bill Gates would take a just little less in tax cuts America's stock could rise too.

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/10/18/18545332.php

Palin's Stump Speech

2008-10-18T08:56:00.007-08:00

REPUBLICAN VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE GOVERNOR SARAH PALIN REMARKS AT A "ROAD TO VICTORY" RALLY LOCATION: CLEARWATER, FLORIDA TIME: 9:00 A.M. EDT DATE: MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2008

GOV. PALIN: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And Senator Lieberman, thank you for that kind introduction. And it is so good to have all of you here today. As Senator Lieberman just said, he's never seen so many people up so early and we thank you for making that sacrifice. (It's nine AM.)
(Applause.) (Now comes the pander-fest: mention location and sport team.)
Thank you so much for that very, very warm welcome to the state of Florida. You take my breath away. Thank you, Florida.
(Applause.)
The flags are beautiful. Thank you for that also. God bless America. You guys get it. Thank you.
(Applause.)
It's great to be here in the home of the Tampa Bay Rays, too. (Applause.)
I know that earlier some of the experts this year are kind of tough on the Rays. I've been there. But what a difference a season can make. And now the Rays are in the playoffs for the first time ever. Florida knows a little something about turning an underdog into a victor, and together that's what we can do.
(Applause.)
How about it Florida? Let us do that for Senator John McCain.
(Applause.)
So the last time that our campaign came to Florida it was up in the villages and it was so much fun. Thousands of people out there. Golf carts everywhere. We got such a kick out of that, that was cool. Thousands of people out there to hear our message of reform and positive change. And they came there like you today because the people of Florida are ready to shake things up in Washington. (What? How long before you actually say something?)
(Applause.)
So John McCain and I, we are taking our cause and our case for reform to every voter of every background in every region of America. Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent, (Alaska Independence Party?) maybe you don't belong to any party at all, we're asking for your vote. And it's going to be a hard fought contest. Right here in Florida it's going to be a tough contest. With your support, though, we'll win Florida.
(Applause.)
We'll win for you.
(Applause.) (Still waiting for you to say something.)
So, I wanted to come here a couple of days earlier but I had an appointment in St. Louis that just wouldn't wait.
(Applause.)
And so on Thursday night I had a little debate with Senator Joe Biden.
(Boos.)
Joseph Biden is a decent man, he is. And I enjoyed meeting him for the first time. I was so proud, though, to get to make the case for the next president of the United States, John McCain.
(Applause.) As I explained to Senator Biden, John McCain is the only man in this race who will solve our economic crisis and not exploit it. And he's the only man in this race with a plan that will actually help our working families, and cut your taxes, and get our economy back on track.
(Applause.) (By Mr. McCain's own admission the economy is his weak suit.)
He's the only man in this race who talks about the wars that America is fighting and he isn't afraid to use the word victory. (Our own commanders in the field don't talk about "victory", but about "success".)
(Applause.)
Our opponent gives speech after speech about the wars that America is fighting and it sure would be nice if just once he'd say that he wants America to win. (Succeed?)
(Applause.)
See our opponent voted to cut off funding for our troops even after saying that he would never do so. (Misleading. Voted against one of two competing bills. Voted for the other, and ultimately, of course, supported the funding. McCain did the same thing, for the other version.)
(Boos.)
And he said that our troops in Afghanistan are just quote, "raiding villages and killing civilians."
(Boos.) (Out of context. Was commenting on a specific case. Everyone else also agreed the soldiers in question were in the wrong. It's war, it happens.)
And that's not what our brave men and women in uniform are doing in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is fighting terrorism and protecting us and our values.
(Applause.)
And they're building schools for children in Afghanistan so that there is hope and there is opportunity in that country. That is what our troops are doing and they deserve our gratitude and they deserve our support. (Obama supports a major increase in our presence in Afghanistan.)
(Applause.)
See, John McCain is a different kind of man. He believes in our troops and their mission. And as the mother of one of those troops that's exactly the kind of man I want as commander in chief.
(Applause.)
Man, some of your signs just make me want to cry. Thank you so much. I love you guys.
(Applause.) Thank you.
(Applause.) (Sniffle. Now let's see how many times I can say "Florida", and pander to veterans.)
Senator McCain -- Senator McCain served our nation in uniform for 22 years, five and a half years he was a POW. In fact, it was after graduating from the Naval Academy, he was stationed right here in Florida. That's where he learned to do what he does, here in Florida.
(Applause.)
And Florida, it was in your skies that he trained to become a naval aviator. And Senator McCain is proud to have been part of Florida's strong tradition of military service. And today, we're proud of all the Floridians who have worn our country's uniform. Your state is home to millions.
(Applause.)
Florida is home to millions of our veterans and many of our nation's active duty soldiers and airmen. And they continue to keep our nation strong and secure. And I know that here in the audience there are veterans, there are those who are serving today. Would you do me the honor, raise your hand, let us applaud you? Thank you, guys.
(Applause.)
We thank you and we love you guys. Thank you -- and gals, thank you.
(Applause.) ( Hang on. Has she actually said anything yet?)
Florida, in just 29 days it will be the time for choosing in this election. And here's how I look at the choice that we face. In politics there are some candidates who use change to just promote their careers. And then there are those leaders, like John McCain, who use their career to promote change. (The writers worked all night on that one.)
(Applause.)
This is a moment when principles and political independence matter a lot more than just the party line, as Senator Lieberman just told you. It matters a lot more than just the party line. John McCain is his own man. He doesn't run with the Washington herd. And he and I don't just talk about change, we're the only candidates in this race with a track record of actually making change happen. (Lieberman was McCain's hands down choice for VP. McCain was convinced by hardliners to run with the herd and choose a "base" candidate, Palin.)
(Applause.)
As mayor and as a governor, I reminded people that government is not always the answer. In fact, government too often is the problem. So we got back to basics and we put government back on the side of the people.
As mayor, I eliminated taxes on personal property and I eliminated taxes like small business inventory taxes. Those burdens on our small businesses, we got rid of them. Property taxes were too high. Every year that I was in office I reduced that (mill levy ?). (And built a gigantic, publicly funded, sport complex.)
And as governor, I brought the same agenda of positive change on a state level. I came to office promising to control spending, by request if possible, but by veto if necessary. And today, our state budget is under control and we have a surplus. And I put the veto pen to nearly half a billion dollars in wasteful spending. (She actually vetoes the entire budget, then has the Legislature come to her in small groups and lobby for each individual road or school.)
(Applause.)
We suspended our state fuel tax and I'm returning a chunk of our surplus money right back to the people of Alaska. It's their money and they can spend it better than government can spend it for them. (Of course Alaskans don't pay state taxes. Its the oil tax money she's spreading around. Redistribution of wealth? Not that I'm complaining.)
(Applause.)
Imagine that. Imagine that, having that principle. And that's what we're going to bring on a national level also. That principle of knowing that -- no, the people, our families, our businesses they know best so let them keep more of what they earn and produce and not have this government take trying to quote, "solve" all the problems for our families and our businesses. No, we're not going to do that. (Huh? Hang on, I think she's trying to say something of substance. She just compared giving oil company tax money directly to the people with letting companies keep "more of what they earn" and not expecting government to solve our problems. Oh wait, that doesn't make any sense)
I've always known that I was accountable to the people who hired me. There, it was the people of Alaska. (Which is why she promised to serve out her term just before she accepted the VP nod) And in a McCain-Palin administration I promise you that we will never forget that we'll be there in D.C. to work for you the people of America.
(Applause.)
So one mission of a McCain-Palin administration will be to set this nation firmly on a course of energy independence. (Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill! No? Not yet?)
(Applause.)
Across Florida and all across America, high gas prices is making a full tank at the pump seem like a luxury. And the cost of living, of course, is going up. And the cost of groceries is going up. Everything is going up, but the value of your paycheck is going down. (So let's here it for tax cuts for rich people!) And that's because of high energy costs. (Oh. I thought it was because I work at WalMart) So, to meet America's great energy challenge we're going to need an all of the above approach. And that, in a McCain-Palin administration, will mean developing new alternative energy sources. And it will mean requiring to build more nuclear power plants. And in Florida, it means alternative sources of energy like wind and solar. God has so richly blessed you here.
(Applause.) (Drill, baby, dr...not yet?)
Look at these sources of energy here in Florida that are still sitting untapped. And we'll tap into them, along with environmentally friendly off shore production. We do need to drill here and drill now. Now you can chant the drill baby drill.
(Applause.) (Yes! Now, how many time can you say "American"?)
It's as simple as this, Florida. In a McCain-Palin administration we will achieve energy security for our country. It is a matter of national security and economic prosperity. That means American energy resources brought to you by American ingenuity and produced by American workers.
(Applause.)
And we're also going to bring tax relief to every (rich)American and cut taxes for businesses so you business owners you can hire more people. That's how jobs are created. (Thanks for clearing that up.)
(Applause.)
Here again, John McCain is the real reformer. In this election, he is the real reformer and he can do this and he has a record to prove it. And so do I, as a mayor, as a governor who cut taxes for the people of Alaska. You know, in this campaign, in this election, I think the phoniest claim in a campaign that's been full of them, is that Barack Obama is going to cut your taxes? (That's right its only for ninety five percent of us.)
(Boos.)
I mean, think about it. He's built his whole career on doling out tax money, first as a Chicago politician, and then raising taxes as a senator. He's voted 94 times to raise taxes. (McCain voted to spend the money, but borrows from China to get it. We owe over $400,000 per person right now. Painful as it will be we gotta pay for it someday, somehow.)
(Boos.)
Even on middle class every day working Americans making $42,000 a year, he voted to raise those taxes. (Not true) And he tried to waste a million dollars a day just on his requested earmarks. (As mayor and Governor, Palin was a fervent fan of earmarks.) And now, he's committed to almost a trillion dollars in new government spending. And yet, he never bothers to explain where all that's going to come from to pay for all of that. (China?) And dog gone it, no one seems to be asking him how is he going to pay for the huge government growth that he wants. No one is asking him. So you all, just do the math. Either do the math or just go with your gut. In either way, you're going to come up with the same conclusion, Barack Obama is going to raise your taxes. (Actually if you do the math Obama will cut your taxes. For our purposes here, better go with your gut.)
(Boos.)
So, there's a pattern here of a left-wing agenda that is packaged and prettied up to look like mainstream policies. And everybody knows that this country has got to be put back on the right track. But the problem with our opponent's agenda is that higher taxes and bigger government and activist courts and retreat in war, that's not the right track for our country. That's another dead end. (Let's see, if you borrow from China instead of raise taxes, and recognize that we retreated in Afghanistan to go to Iraq, those are all the Bush policies that McCain still supports.)
(Applause.)
We have that plan to put our country back on the right track. Okay now Florida, evidently there's some interest in what I've been reading lately. And I think that this comes from -- it's a result of a probably less than successful interview that I had recently with kind of mainstream media. (Just the kind of clear speaking that served you so well in that interview.)
(Boos.)
Yet, you know what, in response to critics after that interview what I should have told them was I was just trying to keep Tina Fey in business, just giving her more information. (True, she gets laughs by quoting you verbatim.)
(Applause.)
Job security for SNL characters. All right. Really in that interview I was just getting really impatient because I was so convinced that Americans want to hear about the issues that are so important in your life: how to win the war, how to get the economy back on track, public education, accountability in our schools, more choices for our parents with education. Those things. (It all comes to her, now.)
(Applause.)
So, I do have to apologize, though, for being a little bit impatient, a little bit annoyed. But anyways, so one of the questions about well what do I read everyday? (Cereal boxes?) And my answer was sort of flippant, (Actually you could not name a newspaper that you read.) Well, I was reading my copy of the New York Times the other day, okay.
(Boos.)
And I knew you guys would react that way, okay. So I'm reading the New York Times, though, and I was really interested to read about Barack's friends from Chicago, as the New York Times (put it ?). (Cue appeal to fear.)
(Applause.)
Now it turns out one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers.
(Boos.)
And according to the New York Times he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that quote, "launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol."
(Boos.)
And then there's even more to the story. Barack Obama says that Ayers was just someone in the neighborhood, but that's less than truthful. His own top adviser said that they were quote, "certainly friendly." In fact, Obama held one of his first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers living room. (Just plain not true.)
(Boos.)
And they worked together on various projects in Chicago. (School reform, on a Republican sponsored board.) And, you know, these are the same guys who think that patriotism is paying higher taxes. (We all know patriotism is making your kids pay higher taxes.)
(Boos.) (OK, now let's talk about how afraid we should all be.)
Remember, that's what Joe Biden had said. And I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America, as the greatest source for good in this world.
(Applause.)
I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.
(Boos.) (Great! You made it sound like Obama is bombing the Pentagon. I am very afraid. Now throw out a Reagan reference, and bring it home:)
This, ladies and gentlemen, has nothing to do with the kind of change that anyone can believe in, not my kids, not for your kids. What we believe in is what Ronald Reagan believed in, and that is America is an exceptional nation.
(Applause.) (Everybody chant!)
(Chant of USA) Remember Ronald Reagan used to talk about America being that shining city on a hill for all mankind to see and that America is a good and honorable nation. We are not a perfect nation but we learn from our mistakes. And individually, no we are not perfect; but collectively together America represents a perfect ideal. It's freedom. It's tolerance. It's respect for equal rights. It is those things that our military men and women have fought and died for, and freedom is worth fighting for. (Yay! Individually we ain't much, but as a howling mob, we're perfect!)
(Applause.)
So look at the contrasts. On November 4th, you'll have that choice, the contrasts. The only man who can take on Washington is Senator John McCain.
(Applause.)
Okay, so Florida you know that you're going to have to hang onto your hats because from now until election day it may get kind of rough. (We might for instance start calling Obama a terrorist.) That's all right. You're going to hear our opponents still go on and on about how they're going to fight for you. But since he won't say it on his own behalf, I've had to kind of make it my business to say it for him. (?) There is only one man in this campaign who has ever really fought for you.
(Applause.)
He has the courage to go on fighting for you. That man is John McCain so God bless you for supporting John McCain. Thank you, Florida. God bless you and God bless America.
(Applause.) (Um, did she ever really really tell us what they plan to do, if elected? Oh well, I'm stoked. Let's go to a bar and beat up a gay.)
Thank you.
(Torches and pitchforks will be available as you exit.)

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/the-odd-lies-11.html

Senator Stevens Sin: A Fall from Faith in Democracy

2008-10-17T07:56:00.004-08:00

As Uncle Ted takes the stand today in his own defense he will claim to be so obtuse that he was unaware of the existence or value of gifts laid at his feet. It is red faced grass kicking lie, like that of a boy caught by his mother breaking rules he thinks are stupid. The barely concealed current running through the recorded phone conversations between Stevens and former pal Allen is that the rules are wrong, not them.

Because Stevens is a fallen angel.

His faith in the messy, loud and inaccurate system of government that is a democratic republic has been bleached out of him in his long years wrassling laws in the Senate. He is like the Catholic priest whose long years in a cynical system have made him forget the goodness that still sits in the pews.

His implicit motto is the famous quote from Men In Black:

"A person is smart. People are dumb panicky animals, and you know it."

I can understand this, to a degree. Here in Kodiak our quest to build a new police station has been a study in the inefficiencies of democracy. A City Dictator, conferring with a few of our prominent citizens, could have decreed a new station site despite the howls of the ignorant masses that it is in the wrong place. Could have saved us a couple of million dollars. Of course the station would have gone where the citizens didn't want it. But citizens are like children. They don't know what they really need.

Uncle Ted truly believes that it is better to confer with the Captains of Industry than to sift through the clamor of the masses. This is his true crime--his every action as a Senator is guided, not by the needs and wishes of his electorate, but by a close contingent of confederates and associates that he has come to trust.

Perhaps Mr. Begich will one day be worn down from dealing with the dunderheads of democracy. At that point he should quit, as Uncle Ted should have, long ago. Because swimming in the sea of the citizenry is what a public servant does. It is not a job you can do sipping champagne on the shore with your homeboys.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14649.html

Senator McScrappy Wrong Skipper for Ship of State

2008-10-16T08:22:00.003-08:00

Both candidates for the US Presidency were looking up-all-night haggard as they gave their early morning comments to the press about the cartwheeling stock market on the day of their final debate.

Obama suggested some short term life rings, including letting the cash strapped middle class dip into their retirement money without penalty.

McCain said "I'm a fighter" and flew into a flurry of furious chest beating pro wrestler pronouncements. He would "take on" the profiteers of Wall Street as he had members of his own party in the Senate. This is a central theme of McCain's campaign: the scrappy fighter who will battle on in Iraq, combat spending in Washington, butt heads with Russia and drop veto bombs on the Democrats in Congress. He is the raging bull of this election.

In sharp contrast, Obama's talent is in forceful negotiation. From his days heading the Harvard Law Review to his time in the US Senate he has shown himself adept at bringing combatants to an area of common ground and compelling them to cooperate based on mutual benefit. Lincoln amazed pundits of the time when he kept his fiercest rivals close by giving them high level cabinet posts. Forced into the same room with a man of Lincoln's talents, the men (including Seward, a patron saint of Alaska) became a very effective team at a time in history when we needed it most.

I appreciate McCain's tenacity, and I think I now have a clearer view of the Senator's role as a volatile and passionate spur to that sometimes sluggish body. But his combative nature and admittedly impulsive style of decision making are not what this nation, or this planet, needs right now. We need a skipper with a steady hand.

Because the nature of the skipper determines the culture of the boat.

Some skippers tear around town in their pickups without a plan, quickpatching the equipment, yelling at the crew, leaving the dock at the last minute to arrive on the grounds just in time to overload the boat on the port side and nearly roll over, but you barely get all the fish down without sinking and head back to town where you will do most of the gearwork before the skipper shows up to tell you he wants to change out all the hooks so you'll have to do the gearwork all over again but he just got a tendering contract so you can do that and paint the boat while you pack salmon unless he sells the boat next week. These people are exciting to work with and can even be successful, right up to the moment they sink the boat.

John McCain is that kind of skipper: hot-headed, impulsive, driving without a compass. Early on his campaign squandered its first twenty four million dollars, fired its staff and rolled into New Hampshire listing badly. Since then he has been tearing around the nation in his pickup- without a coherent message, but catching enough votes to make it pay. Straight talk was junked for Bush style win-at-any-cost politics. He has patched together a crazy coalition of independents who used to like him and hardliners who used to hate him (Republicans seem strangely caught between self-loathing and loathing for everyone else.)

In contrast Obama's campaign has been the height of cool efficiency. Again he has attracted a coalition of talented and dedicated people united by their common ground, its bounds so well articulated by Mr. Obama. He is a skipper who inspires confidence, and hard work.

At the debate McCain wants to fight. Fidgeting and grimacing in his chair, he throws his haymakers-- invoking the "anger" of the public over "redistribution of wealth" and "sitting down with terrorists". Jake LaMotta has his head down and is punching furiously. He's swinging wild. In the end he looks frustrated.

Obama has his head up. He has stepped easily away from McCain's charge. He is looking into the camera. He seems to be looking beyond Mr. McCain. He's talking to us now. Articulating the common ground where we can all meet, and fix this country.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/05/presidential-debate-moder_n_117048.html

State Paid For Palin's PR Consultant

2008-10-13T10:32:00.005-08:00

National Media Blitz Powered By Gas

Did you wonder why Sarah Palin was suddenly in the national spotlight just before John McCain started casting around for a VP?

Give the credit to Marcia Brier, a Massachusetts based public relations expert hired by the state of Alaska to promote the Governor. The state paid $31,000 to Brier, who pushed Palin in prepackaged stories like "Big Oil Under Siege", which painted Palin as a firebrand maverick who singlehandedly defeated the oil companies and drove through the gas pipeline package.

In a story linked below, Washington Post reporter Kimberly Kindy reveals the Alaska Department of Natural Resources hired Brier to sell Palin so she could in turn sell the gas pipeline. Brier hammered the media with prewritten stories, or "pitches" that characterized Palin as the single driving force who backed down the oil companies, tamed the Alaska Legislature and gave birth to the gasline all alone in the Wasilla wilderness.

This would no doubt come as a surprise to the many Alaska statesmen who drew a line in the tundra and refused to buckle down to the old guard and their oily masters--Berkowitz, LeDoux, Ramras, French...it is Alaska's Legislature who has the dirt of the pipeline under its fingernails, and deserves most of the credit. Meanwhile "Where's Sarah?" buttons became common in Juneau as the Guv became increasingly obsessed with courting the media. She had already shown a distinct distaste for the capitol, preferring to rule from Wasilla and collect a per diem for working away from J-town. And for the time she spent meeting privately with executives of ExxonMobil and Marathon Oil in early 2007.

After the Legislature passed the gas pipeline incentive plan the media campaign really took off. Suddenly Brier had takers for her Palin stories. But the media pieces had much less to do with gas than with the selling of Sarah. Stories in People and Fortune magazines, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News, 60 Minutes and the Wall Street Journal all focused on Palin's person, not the pipeline.

And the minute she was picked as VP candidate the contract with Brier was terminated.
"We'd achieved our objective with getting the national attention," said Palin staffer Kurt Gibson said. "There was no need anymore to use state money to achieve that."

Uh-Huh. What was that objective again?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/09/AR2008100903429_3.html?sid=ST2008100903556&s_pos=

http://news.spreadit.org/sarah-palin-vogue-magazinesarah-palin-vogue-picture-interview/

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations/2008/09/palin_per_diem_travel_expenses.html

Thanks for Ruining Our Governor

2008-10-13T09:17:00.009-08:00

Trying to close the Troopergate after the Facts have Escaped

Hubris. Its a disease. A swelling of the ego that blocks all other brain function.

Why did Governor Palin accept the VP nomination? She must have known that there were dozens of GOP politicians better qualified for the job. She must have known that it directly contradicted her promise to serve out her term as governor.

And she definitely knew about Troopergate.

It's outrageous that the McCain campaign spent money trying to quash the Alaska Legislature's report on Troopergate. I remember reading ADN's well reported headline story on Troopergate just after Monegan was fired. We now know officially what we all learned way back then. That the governor had allowed surrogates to lobby for the firing of a trooper who happened to be the guv's ex-brother-in-law. Head Trooper Monegan refused to fiddle with their stonefaced system of review. Head Trooper Monegan got fired.

The trooper sounded like a terrible cop. I think most Alaskans assumed she had good reasons to want the trooper fired. And they realized that she is Monegan's boss. She can fire him if she wants. But it was pretty obvious that she had made a rookie mistake by not reining in those who would act on her behalf, outside the bounds of government. I think most of us figured she would get a meaningless but well-intended investigation into the matter after which the legislature would harrumph about refining the ethics rules and the trooper would be fired quietly in the background. And so it should have ended, the Governor's first scrape with scandal and a lesson learned all around.

Then the VP nod pushed her, and all Alaskans, into the national spotlight. We haven't been doing very well in the spotlight. Governor Palin has been giving speeches laced with fear and fury all across the country, smiling on as roaring crowds yell out "Kill 'im!" and "Terrorist!". Next stop the Munich beer hall circuit. And the topper- having to watch smirking news analysts play footage of her contradicting nearly exactly the findings of our meaningless but well-intended investigation.

Darn it, she was playing her role just fine up here. A kind of Wasilla Ice Queen that the noblemen of the Legislature approached with a sweeping bow and a budget in hand.

You big city folk just had to tempt her with your bright lights and fancy stylists.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/08/AR2008100802928.html

Flip This Economy

2008-10-10T07:21:00.008-08:00

I can tell you the first person who knew in his guts that something in this economy was terribly, terribly wrong.

He was slumped over the wheel on I-80, stuck in a gridlock, halfway into the two hour daily lemming run into the city.

All around him, far as the eye could see, were people just like him. Blinking in traffic next to empty latte cups, idling away gas they couldn't afford to get to jobs they might lose, vainly trying to keep up with expanding mortgages on houses a hundred miles away from where they work. All because every single converted clothes closet in the city was going for a million bucks.

As he sat there looking over at the shadow faced driver in the lane next door, nodding, like himself, to the "Dink and Dork in the Morning Show", he must have thought:

"This can't be right. How much can one crappy apartment in San Francisco really be worth?"

Somehow, in between the "Flip This House" type TV shows and the late night no money down infomercials, we were convinced that selling real estate back and forth to each other at exponentially increasing prices qualifies as an industry. The entire ponzi scheme is based on the idea that someone even stupider than you will come along with a bigger wheelbarrow full of money and cash you out. That guy then paints the porch and waits for a bigger idiot, perhaps someone in a clown suit driving up the driveway in a shiny dumptruck full of money.

Yes, it was glorious. A balloon payment, fee encrusted, high interest, high profit gold rush--all paid for by the next guy. But if all those real estate players had no jobs, no credit ratings and no cash, then where exactly did all the money come from?

Enter woolen skinned men in tall glassy cubicles. Specifically AIG, the investment wizards to whom the US taxpayers are now handing our wallets. Only recently they liked to brag that they invented the investment vehicle by which both their fantastically wealthy clients and the banks where we all put our money made unbelievable profits on the real estate idiot chain. All you had to do is bundle up the "risky" high interest home loans (often mixed with safer stuff like your municipal bonds for schools and sewers). Then you just keep pouring money on them, kind of like gasoline on a nice toasty fire. Just put enough loose money into the hands of clowns pulling dumptrucks into the driveways of recently remodeled McMansions and the whole system works wonderfully. The money you dump onto the idiot chain comes flowing back to your investors from the unbelievably high interest rates on the loans. Meanwhile fees and consultation services and sales commissions can keep a company like AIG in the spas six months out of the year- good spas too, where young girls whip you with eucalyptus branches while they recite lines from "The Art of War".

Yes the whole system works beautifully until that last clown never comes up the driveway. You don't want to be the last idiot in the idiot chain.

Like every pyramid scheme it finally collapsed under its own weight.

If there's anything to be proud of in all this it is that we apparently suckered the entire planet in. Yep, its the biggest scam of all time.

McCain Can't Catch a Wave, Uncle Ted for President

2008-10-09T08:36:00.005-08:00

Did you know that Alaska's Senator Ted Stevens was a pioneering surfer?

Say what you will about Alaska's Senior Sourpuss, the man knows when to sit on his board and when to paddle. Since before statehood he has shown the knack for recognizing a rising groundswell and riding it well. Even now, sitting on his board in federal court with shoals of evidence all around him he is waiting for the right moment to start paddling. Sure enough, his prosecutors have bumbled him up a wave of mistakes. He may ride out of this one yet.

John McCain, on the other hand can't catch a wave. Eight years ago he tried "straight talk" and was obliterated by the Bush sleaze machine. This time he went to the dark side only to be swept off his board by a wave of hope and honesty. Whether its the war in Iraq, the economy, drilling our way to energy independance, or the idiocy of picking Governor Palingate, he always seems a day late, a dollar short.

Is it too late for the Republicans to run Uncle Ted?

Mr. Terry Goes to a Meetin'--Chapter Four

2008-10-08T10:06:00.014-08:00

I'm sitting at the Sheraton sushi bar feeling angry and depressed.
St. Jude is slumped beside me. Even he seems a little put off.

The Fish Council's Advisory Panel, its members only too aware they are being carefully watched by bankers in sweat stained suits, crumpled the Crew Quota Proposal and kicked it under the table. The majority of the A.P. officially signed off on the Crab Ratz Program, saying "the crab program is achieving most of its objectives and that many of the major changes identified in the Council's April Motion would de-stabilize the harvesting, processing, and community sectors and are not necessarily based on the findings of the Council's 18 month and 3 year reviews."

The real truth is jammed between those lines like the sweet greasy middle of an Oreo cookie.

De-stabilize means nervous bankers.

Most of the resistance to making reasonable tweaks to the program lie in the fact that so many owners have "doubled down": using their initially allocated quota as collateral to borrow money to buy more quota. Banks extended the "priviledge" of using quota as collateral because halibut and pollock quota has been such iron-clad investments. What the bankers now know is that the law gives no guarantee of rights, and in fact explicitly states they can be taken away at any time. Any proposal that might redesignate even a small portion of the quota changes the numbers for the crunchers and that makes them nervous.

This is, of course, a terribly short sided view. The real danger to the program, and to every fisherman, banker and processor with a stake in it is in not fixing it. Its easy enough to fend off those of us who come to the Council and engage in the process in good faith. Looming clouds of lawsuits based on the program's parentage are the real danger. Crab Ratz was hatched because Senator Ted Stevens sat on it, in a nest built by his son, Ben, and a flock of cronies. Dissenting voices were ignored. Even the former Council Chair admitted, after Ratz was pushed through, that unresolved crew issues were her greatest concern. The Senator's system of marking ears for corporate lobbyists who hired his son has cast a shadow across the industry from Adak to the Southeast salmon grounds. A slight alteration of shares over time is a far cry from having the whole shebang thrown out in a federal court. A real effort to correct the program could pre-emp this by making it a moot point.

Four members of the Advisory Panel deserve recognition for their minority opinion, "that it is premature to assert that the Crab Rationalization Program fully meets its original objectives, conservation goals or community protection needs...we recommend that analysis of the 90/10 split continue, while additional analysis on crew shares, WAG issues and ROFRs be initiated."

Signed: Beth Stewart, Michelle Ridgeway, Chuck McCallum, and John Moller.

And is is worth noting the Fish Council is a near autonomous body. They are no more bound to listen to the Advisory Panel than they are the President of Somalia. Or me for that matter.

Meanwhile the ongoing struggle to keep Ratz unchanged (Ratus Quo) is centered on Data Suppression. At the direction of the Fish Council and NOAA General Counsel, a number of studies are in progress that tend to confirm evidence that Ratz has had quite dramatic consequenses for working fishermen and their communities. Owners groups like the Alaska Crab Coalition have spend a great deal of time and money begging the Council to ignore the data, on the basis that it is still being gathered and analyzed and because such a poor job was done gathering Socioeconomic data prior to the implementation of Ratz that there is nothing with which to compare it. I tried to answer this lame circular argument in my official comment to the Council, below:

At the North Pacific Fisheries Council Meeting

2008-10-07T10:17:00.006-08:00

The Charter Vs Commercial Halibut Update

An army of fishermen and lobbyists stormed the latest meeting of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, all with a common word on their tongues: Halibut.

At issue: should increasing harvests by recreational fishermen be allowed to gobble up quota pounds from commercial users, some of whom have mortgaged their entire lives to purchase what they thought was a reliable share of the catch?In the end the Fish Council cleared its slate and concentrated its efforts on this single issue.

The eye of the mosh pit is in commercial area 2C, at the center of Southeast Alaska's tourism boom. Slower accounting methods on the Charter side caused them to overharvest by a million pounds, a number that must be accounted for in assessing next years quotas. This is alarming for commercial harvesters who have bought quota in 2C, often on credit, with the reasonable expectation that an unregulated Charter fleet will not be allowed to use this back door encroachment to draw an unlimited amount of the harvest into their camp.

In the end the Council set a cap on the amount of halibut that can be taken by charter vessels from areas 2C and 3A (with the assumption that charter pressure may well spill over into 3A, the larger halibut biomass on earth) as well as instituting a standard of "triggers" which would limit or increase the amount of fish taken per day by charter boats according to stock levels. Overall the Council took a well-measured view and acted decisively on an issue that has stumped former Councils for decades.

The Motion:

http://www.fakr.noaa.gov/npfmc/current_issues/halibut_issues/HalibutCSPmotion1008.pdf

Wesley Loy on the subject:

http://community.adn.com/adn/node/132254

Questions to ask include whether the accounting system can be upgraded in time for next year, and whether enforcement tools will be effective.

My Comment to the Council on the Crab SAFE Report:

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Council:
My name is Terry Haines I am a member of the Kodiak City Council and longtime commercial deckhand. As you know the City Council and a large number of our citizens have long voiced concerns about the effects of Crab Rationalization on our communities, working fishing boats, skippers and crewmen.

The SAFE (Stock Assessment and Fishery Evaluation) document is a testament to this Council’s continued commitment to responsible management of our stocks.

It is very relevant, however, to recognize what is not in the document, namely work that is still in the meta-data process that looks at the effects of rationalization on skippers, crew and the ability of working vessels to continue to provide an economic base in their homeports.

Don’t lock that data in the SAFE until next year’s report.

While recognizing the need to put data in the wider context, and to verify it, where data might be reasonably used to further measures being developed to help working fishermen and their communities, it should be used.

Where data can be replicated by parallel studies and reasonably put in the broader context they should be made available to the people who have, at the direction of this Council, been working very hard to take a rational look at the social impacts of rationalization.

Because if I see an elephant across the creek and everyone else standing there sees an elephant, it might not be necessary to build a boat and row it across to poke the elephant before we start making some phone calls to see who lost an elephant.
(Laughter and Applause)
Thank you.

NU-CU-LAR BOMB

2008-10-04T06:50:00.004-08:00

Palin Proves Unpresidential

Alright I'm just going to say it. If you don't know the word "nuclear" You should never be president. As Sarah Palin said nu-cu-lar over and over in the recent Vice Presidential debate I saw the grinning grey ghost of George Bush hovering behind her, and I shuddered. It's hard to imagine a governor less qualified to run a country than "W". And yet, there she is.

This is rather painful for me.I was an early and enthusiastic Palin supporter. When no one gave her a chance to win the governor's race I was torching off Op-Eds and webshakers pronouncing her the most honest and uncorrupt candidate (I also supported Berkowitz until he dropped out).

My wife respectfully disagreed. Sarah's inability to specify disturbed her, along with her apparent hostility to her own sex.

To give my wife credit she forgave my pro Palin posture after hearing Bill Clinton (Doesn't he seem nicer since Hillary lost?) explain that sometimes one important issue can dominate a person's politics to the extent that he (or me) will support a candidate on the basis of a single vital issue, ignoring the candidate's more troubling stances. And Sarah has a coherent policy, if not direct knowledge of, resource issues.

But that first step down from there is a doozy.

Listening to the debate I can hear the familiar buzzphrases that have been drilled into her head by former Bush operatives (just glad to have a job, I'm sure). But when she wanders away from the script her inability to simply form a coherent sentence is appalling. Is it really too much to ask that a potential cheif executive have the knowledge and ability to express herself clearly? The "Ya"s and her habit of leaving the "G"s off the end of "ing" words sounds like condescending baby talk. Even Hockey Mom and her husband Joe Sixpack don't need to be talked down to. Shades of Bush again, with his affected Texas accent, non-existant syntax and willingness to trade thought for faith.

As she flashes her plastic smile (Someone in the McCain camp must be yelling "Smile!" all day long) I can only hope the shallow puddle she's standing on doesn't lead people to think she's walking on water.

Red Headed Step-Crew

2008-10-02T11:07:00.006-08:00

I'm sitting next to Dr. Fina in the hotseat. The twenty or so members of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council's Advisory Panel are looking at me like a semicircle of angry bears. It is nearing five o'clock in what has been for them a long afternoon chewing tough flavorless staff reports and gulping unwise amounts of keg coffee. My proposal is in their packet--a scheme that would take something away from many of them, at least on the surface. I look down at "The Proposal" a single page in Mark Fina's vast binder (It is the same as the one below). The Advisory Panel members seem to find it a bit confusing. Hell, I find it a bit confusing (though no more confusing than most of the paper that passes through this panel).

But it will work.

I drift back in time --Branson and I showing up at the meetings before Ratz was implemented wearing sweatpants and rainboots, hand scrawled demands in our hands. Just look at me now--wearing slippers and jeans and the magic hat, with printed up demands right in their packets. We asked for all manner of things back then- (I put in one for a quota pool that would fund health insurance for fishermen) anything, really--value was obviously being carried away from the fishery like furniture after a fire and deckhands were sitting on the soggy lawn like confused stepchildren. Skippers were at least given a ratty folding chair...

Whoops my mind wandered a bit there.

To my left Panel member Mike Martin is fixing me with a flat emotionless gaze. I like Mr. Martin (damn that weakness!) He has a talent for details and is a hounddog for clarification. Later he will grill me like a king salmon steak.

I read the proposal aloud, mouth suddenly croaking dry. Nevertheless I stop with irritating frequency to expand on points (I am a terribly self important blowhard) and the bears begin to shift in their seats, realizing I will be seriously challenging their five o'clock quittin' time.

The Chairman opens the panel up for questions. I hold my breath. As nervous as I am the worst possible thing that can happen right now is that no one asks any questions. Its like hearing "Next!" as you begin your audition.

I needn't have worried. The questions fly, despite the lure of beer and sushi one mere circular flight downstairs. Mike starts. His list of questions is longer than santa's naughty list. Then more questions from the right and left. They bounce back and forth like a Williams sisters tennis match. With a voice like a Death Valley frog I try to answer.

The idea, I say, is to distribute the benefits of rationalization among stakeholders in a way more reflective of the pre ratz distribution.

"If the intent of the Council when they created the program was to privatize access to a public resource so that a small group of stakeholders can extract the maximum value from the resource to the detriment of other stakeholders, and that they be allowed to do so forever, without any investment in the industry, then I question that intent. If such was not the Council's intent then it is their responsibility to fix the program."

"Crew Quota would be unowned and simply harvested by working fishing boats without the onerous lease fee."

Lots of doublespeak has been written about crew compensation. Here's the bottom line: if you charge working fishermen a seventy percent fee to fish King Crab but tell him he can harvest more, that's like telling the McDonald's guy you have to bust him from ten down to three dollars an hour. The good news is you get to work lots more hours.

Gee, thanks mister!

In the end the Advisory Panel seriously looked at all the crew proposals. And that, my friends, has never happened before. Do I dare to hope?

Hope is good. Work is better. I'd better get back downstairs and see if I can't corral Denby or Duncan. And ask them questions.

Plane Crashes Outside My Window

2008-10-01T13:56:00.002-08:00

Just after I finished writing the post below a Cessna 206 crashed off the end of Merrill Field. I did not witness the accident, but immediately noticed the column of black smoke and the firetrucks streaming in from all directions. Its amazing how many Anchorage drivers ignore sirens until they are almost run off the road. My condolences to the families.
And maybe its worth keeping in mind that you could be walking down the street in downtown Anchorage and have a plane fall on you.

Life is short. Don't forget to live it.

Sea Change at Fish Council

2008-09-30T07:49:00.006-08:00

Tuesday, September 30--Anchorage Alaska

I run up the circular stairway to the Sheraton's second floor where the Advisory Panel for the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council is reconvening.

Growling halibut fishermen are settling into hard back chairs as the AP members reluctantly sit back down in front of their vast ring binders full of recomendations and analyses compiled by staff. The fishermen will soon be telling them all the different ways the binders are wrong. The Advisory Panel is a non paid group of industry spokespersons. The Council may listen to them or completely ignore them.

I am hesitant to go inside so I loiter in the hall. Strategic loitering is a big part of effective advocacy. Stephanie from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is there, listening intently to an effusive baseball cap clamped down over the red face of a longliner. I do a shark circle around her, browsing at the documents table, picking out the stuff I might be able to use and slipping them into my faux leather zipper binder.Palming my Kodiak City Council business card with my cell number and the address to this blog written on the front I hover closer, trying to be silently insistent but not overtly rude. I'm hoping to slip her the card and head back to my room--its naptime for grandpa. She is too quick for me. "I'll call you in a while. I want to talk about your proposal."

Stephanie is a front line soldier, the face of the Department's new philosophy under Commissioner Denby Lloyd--to use their Council seat to look out for the citizens of the State, rather than their former role of throwing bloody steaks to the lions of the industry.

I grab a double breve and retire to my room. I've shmoozed my way onto the fifteenth floor, looking straight down the runway of Merrill Field and at the mountains beyond. I grab the desk chair and balance it on the heater unit so I'm sitting window level at the top floor as I sip the breve and watch the Beech Bonanzas and Cessna Citations climb right at me and then bank away from the window at the last minute. There's a lesson here somewhere.

Picking through the papers I took from the governmentese document buffet table I start writing notes like "Ha!" and "?". Then I look down and see the Mammoth Music store across the street.

"Harmonica!" I shout to myself as I jump up and run for the elevator. I have forgotten to bring a harmonica on this trip and I never travel without one. (Be sure to tell the TSA guy about harmonicas in your carry on. They look like gun clips or something in the X-ray--it freaks them out.)

Coming out with a blues harp in "E" I see Jeff Stephen from Kodiak at the curb. Jeff is a boat owner rep and compulsive community servant: he serves on the thankless School Board, for instance. I like him (I like most people- a terrible weakness).

We visit and he mentions my new role as Kodiak community representative to the Council. I leaped at the chance to be the comrep. I have a hard time saying no to a profitless challenge. He mentions something I will hear later from another boat owner rep-that is, whether I can advocate for crew issues and communities at the same time.

"Heck yeah. Crew is part of Community. What's good for one is good for the other."

Stephanie calls and I run off. We go over my Crew Quota Proposal (reprinted below). She has many questions. (So do I, truthfully). She is a deadly serious person, intent on doing her job well and not given to frivolity (or smiling).

I soberly explain to her that the idea is not to sell or give quota to crew- a misapprehension shared by many. "The problem with the program now is that it privatized a public resource, allowing owners to set up a tollbooth in the ocean that charges working fishermen 50-70% for access..."

She stops me. She has heard this from me before.

"How would it work?"

"That's what I'm here to find out."

NEXT: The Council Comes to Town, I Play Bar Trivia with the New York Times and Why the Trial of Ted Stevens Matters to the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council

Mr.Terry Goes to a Meetin'

2008-09-29T18:14:00.004-08:00

Starting Tuesday September 30th

Follow Your Intrepid Blogger as I Attempt to Represent at the October Meeting of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council

In their clenched hands will be a copy of a Proposal that could change the very face of the Deadliest Catch:

Preliminary Crew Quota Proposal for BSAI Crab Committee,
NPFMC Meeting, September 2008

Problem Statement

What is wrong with Crab Rationalization as it is presently structured?

The program has created an unnatural imbalance in the most basic economies of fishing communities by focusing access rights into the hands of a very few, allowing them to charge lease fees that extract the maximum possible value. The result is less money in fishing communities and less opportunity for fishermen.

How can these problems be corrected?

Skippers and crew, that is, boots on deck fishermen, will be allowed access to a portion of the quota equal to their traditional share on a yearly basis with no ownership rights. Quota owners will be required to have a significant stake in the industry at a time certain or they must divest themselves of their held quota. Meaningful vessel caps will be implemented, allowing more opportunity for traditional users.

Purpose and Need Statement

To restore traditional balance in the industry a redesignation of a portion of the TAC equal to the traditional share taken by skippers and crew will occur. This redesignated quota, or Crew Quota, will be accessible to BOD (Boots On Deck) fishermen without landing restrictions on a yearly basis based on past participation. In this way the entry level fisherman will be able to work his way up, working boats will be relieved of the burden of heavy lease fees, and the cash value of the fishery will be distributed in a more traditional manner, with fishing communities benefiting from more money in more hands.

Proposal

Quota would be redesignated in three ways:

1. All increases in TAC will be designated Crew Quota.

2. All holders of crab quota will be required to show a significant investment in the industry, or to divest themselves of said quota at a time certain. At the time of transfer a share of the transferred quota will be redesignated as Crew Quota.

3. A portion of existing “A” and “B” shares will be immediately redesignated as Crew Quota.

BOD fishermen will then be encouraged to form a Regional Fishery Association as defined in MSA:

The term Regional Fishery Association means an association formed for the mutual benefit of members--

A) To meet social and economic needs in a region or sub region;

B) Comprised of persons engaging in the harvest or processing of fishery resources in that specific region or sub region or who otherwise own or operate businesses substantially dependent on a
fishery.

This document is meant to be a starting place for discussions which will result in a formal presentation to the NPFMC at its October 2008 meeting in Anchorage Alaska. All interested parties are encouraged to contact the Crewmen’s Association to help refine the proposal.

Terry Haines, CA representative, 907-942-0365, yohaines@alaska.com

Anyone at the Meeting (At the Anchorage Sheraton first week of October) can contact me through this site or the phone number above for an official meeting at Humpy's.

Don't Vote While Stupid

2008-09-17T10:18:00.005-08:00

The Big Lie:
McCain and Palin tear page out of Hitler’s Notebook
I had an upsetting conversation with a friend yesterday-- a person I like and respect who “voted for Al Gore”. She plans to vote for McCain/Palin this time.
“Why” I asked.
“Because Obama is going to raise our taxes.”
“That’s not true. Most of us will get a tax cut.”
“Not if I make more than $200,000.”
“Do you make more than $200,000?”
“No”
“Then you will get a tax cut.”
“No. He’s going to raise taxes before he lowers them.”
“Now that’s just false.”
“His only experience in government is community service”
“That’s what he did right out of college. He’s been a state and U.S. Senator and is a professor of Constitu…”
Someone a few feet away said “That boy called our Governor a pig.”
My skin prickling I said “No, what he said was…”
But it was too late. My friend and the new entrant were comparing notes noisily.
I looked up at Fox News on the TV monitor and shuddered. We will get what we collectively deserve, I suppose.

For the record:
1. The tax “increases” McCain often references are of course a more complex deal than they let on. Of course they are, just look at your own taxes. It is fair to say, though that they mostly refer to closing tax loopholes used by companies like Exxon to avoid being taxed on real profits, and simply not continuing the Bushcuts-- tax breaks for our most wealthy citizens.
2. If you only watch Fox, or only listen to NPR, or only do as your Minister wills, don’t vote. This election requires us to crosscheck the facts and know your own mind.

As for McCain/Palin: This from the redoubtable Wiki:

The Big Lie
Used in Hitler's psychological profile
The phrase was used in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile:[3]
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.[4]
The Big Lie in popular culture
George Orwell's novel 1984 refers to the Big Lie theory on several occasions. For example:
“The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.” [5]
“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed...” [6]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/17/palin.probe/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c

Catch This One: Kodiak Fisherman Meets Don Young at Golf "Tournament"

2008-09-08T13:55:00.002-08:00

Young Serves Up Seafood--Accepts Donations

You must read this recent post on Alaska Report (bottom). Congressman Young, having apparently scraped out a victory in a Republican primary in which he was pitted against an opponent with the charisma of a sheet of unlined white paper, was busily accepting donations to his legal, ah, I mean campaign fund while he still can-- before Democrat Ethan Berkowitz beats him like a flapping halibut in the General, making it at least uncomfortable for him to continue to take money from corporations to keep himself out of jail.

Exxon played a similar stalling game for the last twenty years. They could afford to postpone justice indefinitely (many would say forever). Its nice to think that soon Don Young will run out of money to pay his lawyers. They are engaged in an expensive game of challenging every scrap of damning evidence by claiming it has some tenuous link to his job as a "legislator".

I suppose his golf clubs could never be used as evidence against him. They seem to be his single most indispensible tool.

http://alaskareport.com/news98/x61595_seafood_invitational_golf.htm

Beating the Dead Horse

2008-09-05T10:54:00.003-08:00

The scandals just keep piling up for poor Sarah Palin. From her daughter's teenage pregnancy to her embarrassingly false claim that she said "Thanks but no thanks" to funding for the Bridge to Nowhere, and now her affiliation with the Alaska Independent Party, the girl just can't seem to get a break. Never mind those hilariously photoshopped pictures that I'm sure ended up in your email inbox.

I am confused as to why McCain made this choice. Perhaps that's not entirely accurate: I think I can assume why he selected this underdog from Alaska to round out his ticket. I believe it was a misguided attempt to scrape up a few die-hard Hillary fans, whom he blindly assumed were bent on getting a female into office, no matter her political position. Unfortunately, this has backfired more loudly, smokily, and stinkily than a tired, decrepit Jalopy circa oh, say, 1936. What happened to Hutchinsen, the presumptive pick? How about our friend Olympia Snowe, a refreshingly moderate Republican, one of TIME magazine's "Top Ten Senators" in 2006? TIME noted; "Because of her centrist views and eagerness to get beyond partisan point scoring, Maine Republican Olympia Snowe is in the center of every policy debate in Washington."

Snowe secured a seat in the Maine House of Representatives in 1973 at age 26, and has had an illustrious non-stop political career ever since, culminating in her current run as senator, enjoying a comfortable 79% approval rating in her home state. Her moderate views would certainly tantalize an Independent voter, doubtless the deciders of this historic election, far more than the hard-right leanings of our dear Governor.

But what's done is done. I predict that over the course of the next two months, the country will lean harder and harder in Obama's favor, even if no other scandals are unearthed.

And in that case, I'm writing in Olympia Snowe for President.

-Rogue Reporter, Fairbanks, AK

McCain Flying Blind by the Seat Of His Pants

2008-09-03T07:18:00.004-08:00

Mr. McCain wrote in his 2002 book, "Worth the Fighting For."

"Often my haste is a mistake, but I live with the consequences without complaint."

Senator John McCain

Is is OK if we complain?

"She's a partner and a soul-mate," he said of Sarah Palin, whom he had met once, in addition to a single phone call, before making her his VP pick. Hopefully the consequences of this hasty mistake will include the overwhelming victory of Mr. Obama. Because once again McCain shows his style and judgement should disqualify him for the Presidency. Sarah Palin is not ready.

One third of Vice Presidents have wound up serving as President.

Our beloved Governor has, in her twenty short months, flip-flopped on earmarks (she was in favor of the bridge to nowhere before she was against it), frustrated the state legislature with her sphinx-like lack of communication and shown poor control over her own staff. She's only in her very first improper use of power scandal! This would all be fine with us Alaskans: a good lead sled dog must be trained in the traces. But Mr. McCain has taken a promising puppy and put her on an Iditarod team. She will end up hurt, along with the team.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/02/AR2008090203462.html?nav%3Dhcmoduletmv&sub=AR

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/01/AR2008090103127.html

Obamanomics

2008-09-02T08:47:00.002-08:00

Why it is better to give a tax cut to you than to Exxon.

A new book detailing Obama's economic policies is worth a look, whether you support him or not. The basic premise is that "trickle down" economics must be replaced by "bottom up". This will be achieved by giving a tax cut to the middle class rather than the wealthy and big corporations. This can only be achieved in conjunction with a ban on corporate lobbyists.

Take a gander: http://www.realpolitical.net/2008/06/obamanomics/

Republicans Arrest and Gas Journalists

2008-09-02T08:22:00.002-08:00

Shades of China

Amy Goodman, the soft spoken host of "Democracy Now" was arrested at the RNC convention yesterday, along with a fellow journalist ..... Reports of tear gassing the crowd don't sound surprising. Isn't this program of suppression a contrast to the DNC's convention, which if anything, had an excess of enthusiasm?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allison-kilkenny/amy-goodman-arrested-at-r_b_123051.html

Palin Not Ready to be President: Here's Why

2008-08-31T10:43:00.003-08:00

I count myself among the earliest Palin supporters. I first met her at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage with her daughter when she debated gubernatorial candidates for the Southwest Alaska Municipal Conference. I immediately liked her for her habit of looking into your eyes and really listening.
But my vote was predicated on the idea that she would see out her term in office and learn on the job. Because Mrs. Palin is an absolutist. She sees the universe in shadeless black and white. Her positions on abortion and sex education illustrate this perfectly.
She would have every rape victim give birth to her rapist's child. And she would end public funding of contraception education in favor of abstinence only.

"The explicit sex-ed programs," she added, "will not find my support." The stance, which reflected the priorities of the GOP, nevertheless led to an incredulous editorial in the Juneau Empire:
"Abstinence may be a laudable goal, but failing to educate teenagers about how to protect themselves from disease or unintended pregnancy is tragically misguided."
The recently announced pregnancy of the governor's unmarried 17 year daughter is an ironic top note: http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/512560.html
Mr. McCain has espoused the same, in his own awkward way:
He was asked if he supported the use of contraception or President Bush's abstinence-only education program to stem the spreading of AIDS.
"After a long pause, he said, 'I think I support the president's policy.' Does he believe that contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV? After another long pause, he replied, "You've stumped me.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin

Breaking News! Karl Rove is Vladmir Putin

2008-08-31T10:12:00.012-08:00

Wears Sumo Suit When Inside U.S.

I was as disappointed as anyone when Senator John McCain crawled out of the 2000 election as a slithering henchman to the Bush White House.

How had they done it? How did they break him? Was it simply the horrifying realization that the dark side is very effective? In 2000 he bet his political shirt that truth would always conquer lies. His foe Karl Rove, Master of Puppets, had risen to power by using the opposite philosophy: lies work better, they work faster, and can be crafted to acheive the stated goal. Rove made road kill out of the crusading McCain. In the eight years since, The Rove Model: start with the desired conclusion (invade Iraq, subvert the democratic process, etc.) and fill in middle part, (where many of us would foolishly use facts) with juicy delicious half truths and outright lies, to get back to the beginning (where many of us would foolishly start) and pinpoint the problem.

So, we start with the conclusion, let's say "It's Time to Invade Iraq Now", then fill in the middle with yellowcake, unsubstantiated single-source "intelligence" and foam flecked rhetoric, and we get back to the beginning: a braying goat in the desert named Saddam is at the center of world terrorism.

Let's do another. Start with the conclusion, "It's Time to Invade Georgia Now", fill in the middle with paranoia about the west, and false sense of urgency, to get to the beginning: United States proxies in Georgia are killing Russians in South Ocetia. Oh wait a minute, that was Putin.

Hey, hang on! He stepped back from his official position to a more oblique one in which he is still in the spotlight, and still firmly in power. Is it President Putin, or Fox analyst Karl Rove?

Have you ever looked into their beady eyes? They're the same I tell you! They're the same!

And here' why I hope they are not:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/31/dissentious-website-owner_n_122819.html

Vote Sarah Back to Juneau

2008-08-29T18:38:00.008-08:00

Here's your new yardsign:

Alaskans for Obama:

Let's Bring Back

The Governor

McCain is Insane in the Membrane: Picks Pretty Partner Palin

2008-08-29T06:50:00.012-08:00

In a clumsy play for the still simmering Hillary voters seventy two year old John McCain chose Alaska's forty four year old Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate today.
The pretty and principled Palin is a preposterous pick.
Don't get me wrong. I am a big Palin fan. Here in Kodiak she enjoyed early strong support during her unlikely run to unseat Frank "the Bank" Murkowski. She stood up for fishermen when the federal government tried to privatize Alaska's codfish. She stood up for Alaskans when oil companies tried to bribe and cajole the state into an unfair tax rate. But oil and fish corruption pretty much cover her areas of expertise, and she's still learning about them.
The fact is Sarah Palin might well be VP material. In about fifteen years. The Governor of Alaska can afford to paint in broad strokes. Alaska's issues tend to be big and wide, like the state. Even so, Governor Palin has made some expected rookie missteps: the firing of our top cop amidst a scandal surrounding a rogue state trooper who Palin's ex-brother-in-law is the latest. Sarah is still learning her chops. She is the former mayor of Wasilla, an entirely pleasant patch of near wilderness between Anchorage and Fairbanks. She walked out of the woods to become governor. Alaskans are happy that an outsider with very few connections and little experience is shaking up what had been a corruption encrusted state government.
But we are talking about someone who could be leader of the free world in the matter of an instant. The idea of our Sarah being suddenly thrown into a position that one rookie error could result in worldwide catastrophe is alarming indeed. McCain's campaign is centered on Obama's supposed lack of experience. But Obama is Churchill compared to Palin.
Because Sarah is not just voter provoking arm candy for McCain. She will be his replacement should that senior statesman fall to one of the many perils of his presidency. It is chilling to imagine the vacuum in the room as President Palin ponders her options to back down Russia or Iran.
Senator McCain has again shown he no longer possesses the judgement to be president.
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/has_mccain_ruined_palin.php
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=a1uiw5Tqp4EM&refer=home

Do You Feel Dirty?

2008-08-28T06:43:00.009-08:00

Both of Alaska's "Clean" initiatives went down in flames in the primary election. Apparently we don't like clean water or clean elections.

Mining companies dumped millions of dollars into their campaign against the Clean Water Initiative and somehow convinced us it was too much to ask a mining operation to not poison a salmon stream. I was called by a fake pollster whose questions were paragraph long arguments against the measure. Unbelievable. Maybe Don Young is right. We are the dumbest people on earth.
Case in point: the defeat of the Clean Elections Initiative, which allowed a candidate to trade shoe leather and signatures for a pittance of cash from the state to run a few ads. Opponents added up the maximum possible cost (12 million, I think) and waved it around like it was an Adak earmark. They forgot to mention it won't cost any of us a dime. We don't pay taxes in Alaska. In fact we get a nice goody package worth over twenty grand apiece from taxes we shake down from corporations- mostly resource extractors. The cost of Clean Elections would have shaved a couple of hundred dollars from your state gift basket. And it becomes one of the gifts in your basket. So big corporations are going to fund the candidates either way-- they would just rather hand the money over personally. Wouldn't it be nice to have a few public servants who don't start their terms of office in debt to a pack of lobbyists? The hard working Tim June deserves some help getting this back in front of voters so we can look at it again.

http://www.renewableresourcescoalition.org/Clean_Water_Initiative_1.pdf

http://www.alaskansforcleanelections.org/

Boatyard Politics

2008-08-24T14:48:00.006-08:00

I am among a crowd of crewmen in coveralls at the Kodiak boatyard . Up and down ladders wearing goggles and rubber gloves and Darth Vader respirator masks, sweeping the boats with peanut grinders and paint rollers. Fighting the war on rust with epoxy paint.

The radio is on, hot with politics in these last days before the primary election. Alaska’s Rep. Don Young, whose relationship with the constituency seems increasingly hostile, recently called his fellow Alaskans the dumbest people in the world. His gripe at the time was foot shuffling over the pin cushioning of ANWR. He has also said he doesn’t feel obligated to represent anyone who didn’t vote for him. And he doesn’t really want to hear from most of the rest of us. Dick Cheney is more accessible. A handful of premier lobbyists dominate the short ironclad list of lucky citizens who are allowed ready access to Mr. Young’s office. Is there something about thirty plus years in DC that simply bleaches the love of humanity out of you?

He is certainly fed up with the red rumped baboons of the press. This week he abruptly ended an interview in DC when asked about the money that hemorrhages from his campaign fund to his criminal defense team. The question he didn’t answer was don’t the people who voted for you and gave you that money to campaign with deserve to know where it is going? (Reportedly the money goes to lawyers working to suppress potentially damaging evidence by arguing page by page with prosecutors over what is admissible.)
Mr. Young’s red faced silence is answer enough. Rep. Daddy Warbucks is sick of all these maddening questions from Little Orphan Alaska.
What he will say, publicly and repeatedly, is that he’s the bad ass who brings home the pork. So just eat your crispy bacon, kids and don’t ask papa where it comes from. You don’t want to know. And vote for me in the primary or I‘ll bite you like a mink, ingrates.

Senator Ted Stevens was on the statewide call-in radio show “Talk of Alaska” last week. Appalled by the inevitable questions about his own legal troubles, Senator Stevens said he had been traveling the state for a month and hadn’t taken so many questions on the subject. When it was pointed out that to that point he had only taken two questions Mr. Stevens said that’s more than he’s heard over the last month. What this says about the Senator’s staff is troubling. Is there a television in the closet where they store him?
This election we are being asked to vote for the institution of Ted Stevens rather than the man, basing our allegiance solely on pounds of bacon delivered to the state. Very few Alaskans would deny that Uncle Ted has grown himself into a legislative behemoth over the years. But a question must now be asked. How much of the institution that is Ted Stevens now a hollowed out shell with staffers and lobbyists inside, pulling levers? How little does the Senator himself really understand, and what is his actual ability level, given his age? He has given “faith” as his reason to not worry about the prospect of spending his late eighties in a federal prison. Faith is what you have when understanding is beyond you.
Many Alaskans used the word “sad” to describe Uncle Ted’s recent indictment. It is sad. About a decade ago, at the time when our senior senator should have retired in honor and taken his place among the great Alaskans, his age made him susceptible to manipulation. Staffers and lobbyists (the line is hazy),as well as family members, began to run the institution of Ted Stevens as a cash cow, using it to steer wealth by setting up real estate deals and consulting contracts, distributing public resources and granting no-bid contracts. I do feel bad for the Senator. Like Britney, ultimately I blame his family for allowing, and even causing, Ted’s tarnishing. Stevens’ own family should have protected him and his legacy rather than taken advantage of him in his weakness. When the institution is out of office will he be abandoned by those misusing him now? When he was at his zenith Senator Stevens was a strong voice for Alaska, for her villages, her native people, building her infrastructure so Alaska can stand on her own two feet. But a Wormtongue whispers at Théoden’s ear.

At home in the Magnificent Shack I scrub at the paint tattoos on my arms as I watch John McCain on TV. McCain is holding a microphone uncomfortably against his chest in the middle of an open stage at a sport venue. His eyes are locked on the teleprompter set up in the middle of the stage. The downward gaze this forces on him makes him seem school boyishly ashamed.
Maybe he is.
Didn’t he seem much younger eight years ago? Many of us cheered as Annakin McCain used the force of straight talk to disarm darker opponents in the Republican primaries. Until he met up with Darth Rove and was left a smoking carcass to be stepped over by the child-man Bush. The creepy McZombie that rose from that scouring has literally embraced the dark side, falling lockstep behind Cheney and Rumsfeld in their folly. And now we see he has studied his Rove as well. His campaign is rapidly becoming more sinister. His primary offensive weapon is the unsupportable catchphrase, things like “My opponent would rather win an election and lose a war…” He is referring to the success of the “surge” in Iraq and Senator Obama’s opposition to it, along with everything about the invasion of that country. Mr. Obama’s position all along is that we would have profited greatly by focusing our efforts on Afghanistan and bin Laden. And, in retrospect, recklessly pursuing a second front war in Iraq based on lies and faulty information, without a long term plan, resulting in untold needless deaths and shattering families and farms and futures both in the middle east and America, well, it still seems like a sketchy idea. The fact that General Petraeus and the strong true men and women of our armed forces have endured to the point of success despite having been served so poorly and dishonestly by civilians like Rumsfeld and Cheney does not mean a civilian like Mr. McCain gets to take the credit. They are like the bumbling defense of a football team that got way behind, but was bailed out by a surging offense. In fact every member of Congress who was led like a dog to the WMD trough owes a debt to our soldiers. We owe them better plays and better players on our side of the ball. The second half is coming and it’s in Afghanistan. The offense is going to be tired. They’ve been on the field the whole game. McCain is just a loyal assistant coach using the same playbook and players. The fact that he has been saying the surge should be applied to Afghanistan and implying that Mr. Obama would oppose it since he opposed the first one does not bode well. Anyone in uniform can tell you the urban warfare of the surge will not work in the wilds of the Afghan bush. You can be sure that both the CIA and our Special Forces have been there long enough to know how to win. And if Mr. McCain is saying we need more of our overextended assets in Afghanistan then he is agreeing with what Mr. Obama has been saying all along.

Mr. Obama, on another stage (sans prompter), seeming tired and a little pissed off, looked up into the audience and pointedly promised to never question Mr. McCain’s patriotism. Obama is a thoughtful and dignified man, which I value, but I think many of us liked the look in his eye then. A definite what-did-you-just-say-about-my-mother look.

I watch McCain rush through his prompted lines as though he were giving a book report to the class. He pauses for emphasis only when he addresses Mr. Obama’s recent promise to never question McCain’s patriotism and his inference that McCain had questioned his.

“Let me be very clear: I am not questioning his patriotism. I am questioning his judgment. I am questioning his judgment.”

This is clearly not true.
Anyone who would rather see his country lose a war than lose an election himself is not exactly Sergeant York. If fact, he would have to be completely lacking in morals. I’m sure Mr. McCain knows this is not the case.

It doesn’t matter. McCain is throwing up fear bombs and hoping the voters will scatter. Divide and Conquer is Rule #1 in the Rove playbook.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12054520/the_10_worst_congressmen/3

http://www.adn.com/news/politics/fbi/young/story/377218.html

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008079697_webstevens29m.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioy90nF2anI

Tour the Blogs of Alaska

2008-08-06T17:31:00.004-08:00

Alaska Blogs
Powered By Ringsurf

Mr Terry Goes to Town Chapter Three

2008-07-08T07:36:00.003-08:00

On a boat off Cape Chiniak chugging out to the Gulf of Alaska’s deep water:
I am among Four Fishermen baiting up to an Ipod’s amplified thump.
The squid is circling hypnotically into my tub. We bait like robots. Coil coil, hook-squid, coil coil, hook-squid, ever onward into infinity. Our skipper had team shirts made with a Mobius strip logo: the twisted circle with a single side rolling into itself forever. Just like my life. I chuckle to myself. My friends barely glance up; by now they assume I am quite insane.
My right foot is hooked under the baiting table and I am slouched slightly into my tub to account for the roll of the boat in the heavy swell. My two hands, Lefty and the Troublemaker, do all the work on autopilot, leaving me plenty of time to wander through the junkyard of my mind, picking up rusty pieces with moving parts, trying to remember how they once fit together. Fatigue and the Mobius hours of spinning repetition can unlock lost dreams and memories better than years of Manhattan psychotherapy. The conscious mind relaxes, and finally passes out. I see myself sitting on the street corner of a brick house neighborhood that I only visit in my dreams. I blink, and now I’m looking out the window of the Hilton Towers hotel in Washington DC.
This is a memory. My Kodiak City Council personality went to Washington in March. Though I don’t like cigarettes I’ve taken a room on the smoker’s floor (#7), knowing instinctively that it will be a haven for malcontents. Sure enough, it is midnight and my neighbor is having a drunken debate with his roommate on the state of the rate of inflation as it relates to segregation mutations…I’m not sure. An ambulance drowns them out. I’m sitting cross legged on the wide windowsill looking down on Connecticut Avenue. I have all my windows wide open as I always do, because there is something wrong with hotel air. Despite the smog I’d rather breathe air that’s been somewhere than the tired refiltered gas running through the hotel’s climate control system. Of course I’m also smoking a cigar.
Suddenly I feel hungry and I jump the elevator to the street and point my deck slippers downhill.
Gravity pulls me down Connecticut, past steak houses and Thai buffets, all closed. A preppy looking whiskey grill called “Timberlake’s” looks marginally open, with slumpers at the bar and an end-of-her shift waitress who gives me a hostile glance as I loiter outside. I move on. The sidewalk takes me downstreet to a white and black sign that says “Odeon Café”. I squint through the window. Despite the “closed” sign a number of couples are talking over half full glasses of red wine. An elderly man with a hat is eating mussels and spaghetti. A smell of good olive oil and hot bread is seeping under the door. I ignore the sign and pull at the door handle gently, like a safecracker. It makes that locked glass door sound of rejection: clatter, thunk: sorry buddy. I hesitate. The next moments are crucial. I give the interior one more look: nodding my head philosophically, I slowly turn, hungry, yes, but what choice do I have but to return to the cold hard foodless street…From the corner of my eye I see dark haired men point to me and shrug. One waves at me and unlocks the door.
“You are hungry?” he asks with remarkable simplicity.
“Yes.”
He waves me to a small table and throws down a basket of fresh bread.
“Wine?” He opens a menu. I point to a likely red and on impulse order linguine with clams before he can get away. The noodles are wonderful. The flavor of sweet clams shines through without being dominated by garlic or green herbs. The platter is ringed with fresh steamers: chewy little bites of nirvana. I have accidentally ordered an entire bottle of wine, which I purposefully consume.
Afterward I strike up a conversation with one of the owners. He asks why I am in Washington and I tell him I’m here to shake the pillars of heaven: to petition our three Alaska fedreps for justice. I would find out the next day that our senior statesmen, Stevens and Young, were out of town at the one time of year Alaskans come to DC to talk to them.
“What do you have for them?” He pushes an Italian beer across the bar.
“Complaints, mostly”
“No no. In this town you must bring something. Can you provide money, or votes or newspaper stories?”
“Not money, that’s for sure.”
“Then offer the other. A good story is better than money.”
I thank him as he locks the door behind me. I walk slowly back to my room thinking about my story. Halfway back I stop in front of a converted brownstone with a sign that says “Russia House”. Irresistible. I go inside.
NEXT: I visit Senator Murkowski and infiltrate the Capitol.

http://www.odeoncafedc.com/

http://www.russiahouselounge.com/